Old Christmas Card Collage - A Toddler and Kid-Friendly Craft!

While it's always nice to receive festive greetings from loved ones each holiday season, those piles of Christmas cards can certainly build up as the years go by! To keep things manageable, I generally hold on to hand-made cards and store-bought variants with meaningful personal content and recycle the remainder, however this year I came up with an idea for repurposing these. Now that our daughter's 2, she's starting to "get" the concepts behind holidays and her fine motor skills are at a level where she's able to be more  hands-on with crafts, so I thought it would be a fun project for her to convert some of our old cards into a Christmas-themed collage! It worked out fabulously. :) Here are the deets, for those of you who'd like to give this a try as well!

Note - the steps listed assume you're doing the project with a toddler. For an older child (e.g. 4-5+ years), you can adjust the steps so that they're more hands-on - e.g., encouraging a child to cut out their own images, write their own name/message, etc. 

Christmas Card Collage

Materials:

• 15-20 old Christmas cards with different images/designs
• Large piece of paper (we used a 12"x18" sheet of finger paint paper)
• Glue stick
• Scissors
• Christmas stickers to decorate smaller areas (optional)
• Non-toxic, washable markers and/or sticky letters

 

Steps:

1. Lay out materials on a flat surface
2. Ask your child to choose a card image they'd like to include next. Cut out the image.
3. Have your child assist in gluing the back of the image, and allow them to paste it wherever they want on the collage.
4. Repeat steps 2-3 until all large, blank areas of the paper are filled with images. Ask your child about each image as it's added. (What/who it is, colours, what they like about it, etc.)
5. If you're using stickers as well, allow your child to add some of these to jazz things up further.
6. Add a holiday message and your child's name using the markers and/or sticky letters. Allow your child to add some free form details with the markers if they want.
7. Voila! Encourage your child to show off their work of art to friends and family!

Our completed collage!

Comparing her own candy cane to mouse's candy cane on her picture!

So tell me... what do you do with your old Christmas cards? Can you recommend other fun holiday art projects that are toddler-friendly?