A Cardboard Christmas tree and other decorations to make together with a toddler

I love using cardboard in my son's playroom, its easy, cheap (or I'd rather say free, most of the time), fun, personal, different every time, and when we are done playing with it, I have no problem discarding it by putting in our blue bin for recycling.

Back in September I wrote about Santino's birthday (see here), and how I painted a fire truck cardboard cutout. Santino still likes playing with it, but it is becoming old, so soon it will have to go.

When I got the idea to make a cardboard Christmas tree,  I decided to involve Santino in the creative process and let him paint it green. The paint job wasn't perfect, but it didn't really bother us, as long as the tree is green we were happy.

 

Then I got a few sets of foam stickers from a dollar store and let him decorate his tree. This part was tricky, as the pink and purple shiny stars didn't really interest Santino much so he didn't want to stick them on, and the stickers with rockets and planets were too much fun to just look at and play with.

Finally I managed to explain what the stickers are for, and he did put them up, only to take them down a few minutes later to play again LOL.

I also had a sock shape cut out of a construction paper, and let Pipidinko decorate it. I gave him pieces of wrapping paper to glue on the paper sock. He was great at it. I found this idea on one of the homeschooling blogs I like to browse, but can't remember where, so I can't give proper credit. Sorry.

Then I had cut snowflakes out of white paper. I am not very good at that, but I got a hang of creating fun designs after wrecking a few. Maybe a couple hundred snowflakes later I might become good at it.

I taped 3 snowflakes on a large sheet of construction paper, and let Santino paint over with some blue paint (which ended up looking green on the yellow paper), he later added some red too. After the paper dried, I took the snowflakes off, and we were left with some yellow-red-and green snowflake art. I let Pipidinko decorate it with glitter glue. Yay!

I taped all the snowflakes I made on the ceiling bar in Santino's play room. They add fun wintery atmosphere.

 

 

More on cardboard: Fire truck cut out