3 Good Cheers!
Three good cheers for old December!
Month of Christmas trees and toys,
Hanging up a million stockings,
For a million girls and boys,
O, dear December, hurry on.
Oh! please---oh, please come quick;
Bring snow so white.
Bring fires so bright,
And bring us good Saint Nick.
Progressive drawings are for beginners. Exercises like these teach more than fun! Young students learn that shapes make up larger drawings or can be found inside of larger drawings. They also learn to take directions, to watch and be patient and to solve problems through a series of smaller steps.
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| Santa Claus is so round and jolly. Make him a part of a larger drawing so that students may expand their thinking. Encourage them to add more details to their drawings and to color in the spaces as they like! |
More Santa Claus Themed Crafts:
Download and print out the pattern below. The dotted lines indicate where the image will be folded to continue the tree silhouette seamlessly after it is unfolded. The number of images "linked" together in one continuous chain is determined by the length of the paper being cut. Use a very thin paper to make your cutting easier. Cut away the areas indicated by the design. (see image above and read text on the pattern below. This paper-cut may be used as a border around a Christmas bulletin board in a classroom or as a paper chain for the Christmas tree if you like.
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| Christmas Tree Chain Pattern |
More Christmas Tree Themed Crafts:
The following illustrated Christmas toys may be duplicated larger, smaller, or the same size by the use of a grid drawing system. Read about Enlarging and Reducing Pictures Here. After learning this method you can use these pictures as patterns for ornaments, artwork or for making a picture with them. Illustrations include: a rocking horse, drum, ball, football, wheelbarrow, Noah's ark, wooden tree, sail boat, candy cone, trumpet, sled, book and lamb on wheels.
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| Teaching students to transfer images by drafting a grid and making comparisons reinforces many math and artistic skills. |
Here is a game that you can make and play with your friends. All the materials needed are easy to collect around the house. This is a kind of fishing game and is fun to play on winter evenings.
Trim the Christmas tree below with the illustrated ornaments below after coloring and cutting them out. Use the printable cover for Christmas poems to decorate the front of your book. We have many Christmas poems for students to include inside their book of poetry at our Belsnickle Blog and also our Doll Blog Here.
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| Students can color the tree green before pasting ornaments on top. |
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| Color, cut and paste these Christmas ornaments on to the pine tree above, turning it into a Christmas tree! There are so many ornament types here: angels, bells, birds, stars, candy canes, drums, horns, houses, soldiers and snowmen! |
Below are "snow babies" for students to color as they wish, cut out and paste to their packages this Christmas. Snow babies have a long history in our country.
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| Six snow babies per printable for Christmas gift tags. |
"Stars, either cut from cardboard and covered with gold or silver paper, or cut from construction paper, and attached to black thread, may be hung in the windows, used on the Christmas tree, or suspended over the sand table showing a Christmas scene."
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| Star templates in five sizes for the classroom. |
On Christmas Day
by Charles Dickens
Welcome, everything! Welcome, alike what has been, and what never was, and what we hope may be, to your shelter underneath the holly, to your places around the Christmas fire, where what is sits openhearted. In yonder shadow, do we see obtruding furtively upon the blaze an enemy's face? By Christmas Day we do forgive him! If the injury he has done us may admit of such companionship, let him come here and take his place. If otherwise, unhappily, let him go hence, assured that we will never injure nor accuse him!
On this day, we shut out Nothing! Charles Dickens quote.
Thanksgiving
Praise God for wheat, so white and sweet,
Of which to make our bread!
Praise God for yellow corn, with which
His waiting world is fed!
Praise God for fish and flesh and fowl
He gave to men for food!
Praise God for every creature which
He made, and called it good!
Praise God for winter's store of ice!
Praise God for summer's heat!
Praise God for fruit trees, bearing seed;
"To you it is for meat!"
Praise God for all the bouncy
By which the world is fed!
Praise God ye children, all to whom
He gives your daily bread!
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| Samples of drawing exercises listed in the index below. |
Teachers will need to fill in the correct numerical dates for the specific days that will change every year. However, the grid and titles of the days of the week, plus months are already printable on the following calendar pages.
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| January calendar page. |
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| February calendar page. |
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| March calendar page. |
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| April calendar page. |
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| May calendar page. |
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| June calendar page. |
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| July calendar page. |
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| August calendar page. |
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| September calendar page. |
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| October calendar page. |
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| November calendar page. |
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| December calendar page. |
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| Wren mother teaches her young to sing. |
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| This Apple Math Pattern Illustration is in Creative Commons. |
The Game Rules: Above is a illustration of how teachers might assemble an apple tree on a bulletin board in their classrooms for students to participate in math exercises. One the left is a simple apple shape for cutting from red, green or yellow construction paper. Teachers may post either the answers or problems in advance to the board on her own set of apples. Then students may write out the answers to the apple math game on their own apples and post these on top of the teachers sample problems. For those who get the answers or questions wrong...their apples will fall beneath the tree when the teacher checks their answers.
The printable clock can be arranged to keep the scores of school games and contests. Individual teachers will undoubtedly have many other ideas for adapting this template to their classroom work. When each student has his own clock with which to work, he or she can be taught the way the hands move, how the big hand goes fast while the little one moves more slowly, and how the clock shows but half a day's time, etc...
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| A traditional clock face with minute and hour hands. |
The following template of a squirrel may be used in craft projects, art assignments, as classroom decoration etc...
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| An outline of a squirrel eating an acorn. |
Both an illustration and a pattern with instructions for a Native American canoe are included below. There are also two native people, a man and a woman, that may be cut out and added to the canoe as well.
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| Plains native paper dolls for your reconstruction of their village encampment. |
Print and cut from paper then trace around the teepee on top of cardboard to craft a template for young students to use while assembling a village representing Native Americans who once lived on the plains.
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| A picture of what a Native American village might have looked like on the plains. |
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| A grateful companion. |
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| Dog theft by sent at night! |
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| The night delivery. |
A variety of uses are intended for this design, in addition to the development of art projects, students may adapt it for a sand table or if the sails are attached separately at it's back with a pin, it could be placed where a current of air would make them move. Students might also enjoy painting cardboard versions of the windmill on a day when discussions about different countries is a part of the curriculum.
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| A simple pattern of a windmill and gate for the classroom. |
The pattern of the boy pilgrim below shows a the place where the printed pattern may be folded in half and be placed alongside another folded paper and traced around before cutting. Make an entire set of paper cuts for your students. Then use the pattern as a guide to fill in the boy pilgrim's features before coloring.
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| This simple pattern of a boy pilgrim has a collar, a hat, and a face. |
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| Eating soup together. |
A gentleman traveling through Mecklenburg was witness to the following curious circumstance in an inn at which he was staying. After dinner, the landlord placed on the floor a large dish of soup, and gave a loud whistle. Immediately there came into the room a mastiff, a fine Angora cat, an old raven, and a remarkably large rat with a bell about its neck. These four animals went to the dish, and without disturbing each other, fed together; after which the dog, cat, and rat lay before the fire, while the raven hopped about the room.
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| Cat to the rescue! |
A lady had a tame bird which she was in the habit of letting out of its cage every day. One morning as it was picking crumbs of bread off the carpet, her cat, who always before showed great kindness for the bird, seized it on a sudden, and jumped with it in her mouth upon a table. The lady was much alarmed for the fate of her favorite, but on turning about instantly discerned the cause. The door had been left open, and a strange cat had just come into the room! After turning it out, her own cat came down from her place of safety, and dropped the bird without having done it the smallest injury.
It is customary in large boarding-houses to announce the dinner hour by the sound of a bell. A cat belonging to one of these houses always hastened to the hall on hearing the bell, to get its accustomed meal; but it happened one day that she was shut up in a chamber, and it was in vain for her that the bell had sounded. Some hours after, having been released from her confinement, she hastened to the hall, but found nothing left for her. The cat thus disappointed got the the bell, and sounded it, endeavored to summon the family to a second dinner, in which she doubted not to participate.
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| A cat in need of her dinner! |
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| Feeding their own kind. |
The air transportation silhouettes include the following:
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| The crow defends her young. |
A pair of crows once made their nest in a tree, of which there were several planted round the garden of a gentleman, who, in his morning walks, was often amused by witnessing furious combats between the crows and a cat. One morning the battle raged more fiercely than usual, till at last the cat gave way, and took shelter under a hedge, as if to wait a more favorable opportunity of retreating into the house. The crows continued for a short time to make a threatening noise; but perceiving that on the ground they could do nothing more than threaten, one of them lifted a stone from the middle of the garden, and perched with it on a tree planted in the hedge, where she sat, watching the motions of the enemy of her young. As the cat crept along under the hedge, the crow accompanied her, flying from branch to branch, and from tree to tree; and when at last the cat ventured to quit her hiding-place, the crow, leaving the trees and hovering over her in the air, let the stone drop from on high on her back.
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| Hens to the rescue! |
A contest of rather an unusual nature took place in the house of a respectable innkeeper in Ireland. The parties concerned were, a hen of the game species, and a rat of the middle size. The hen, in an accidental perambulation round a spacious room, accompanied by an only chicken, the sole surviving offspring of a numerous brood, was roused to madness by an unprovoked attack made by a voracious cowardly rat on her unsuspecting chirping companion. The shrieks of the beloved captive, while being dragged away by the enemy, excited every maternal feeling in the affectionate bosom of the feathered dame ; she flew at the corner whence the alarm arose, seized the lurking enemy by the neck, writhed him about the room, put out one of his eyes in the engagement, and so fatigued her opponent by repeated attacks of spur and bill, that in the space of twelve minutes, during which time the conflict lasted, she put a final period to the nocturnal invader's existence; nimbly turned round, in wild but triumphant distraction, to her palpitating nestling, and hugged it in her victorious bosom.
These silhouettes (cut from black paper for decorating windows or cut from white paper for decorative borders) are made by folding a sheet of paper into three sections as show below. The folded sections are then folded once more to make three sections of equal size. Sketches for the silhouettes should be made twice the width and exactly the height of the paper in its final fold. When satisfactory sketches are completed and after care has been taken to have them symmetrical and with no cutting to be done through the lefthand folds of the paper, one half of the sketch (vertically) should be sketched or traced on the folded paper and cut out.
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| Students will need either black, white, or orange construction paper and a pair of scissors to assemble this paper Halloween craft. |
Illustrated below are two simple methods for cutting and assembling paper Halloween lanterns for the classroom. Included also are a few simple silhouettes that students may copy to emphasize the theme: a black cat, a black bat, a witch with a cane and Jack-o-lantern.
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| Students will need black construction paper, scissors, a ruler and glue to complete these projects. |
Directions for Making the Squirrel:
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| The elephant's cornack. |
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| The Newfoundland with his lantern. |
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| The singing magpie. |
A gardener, in removing some rubbish, discovered two ground toads of an uncommon size, weighing no less than seven pounds. On finding them, he was surprised to see that one of them got upon the back of the other, and both proceeded to move slowly on the ground towards a place of retreat; upon further examination he found that the one on the back of the other had received a severe contusion from his spade, and was rendered unable to get away, without the assistance of its companion!
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| The toad carries his wounded friend. |
