This paper chain reindeer craft was easy to make and turned out adorable! It is perfect for preschoolers who want to make Christmas decorations because it doesn’t make much of a mess (outside of glue) and it can be assembled pretty quickly so they don’t lose interest in the activity. For more Christmas crafts, check out my crafts page: https://imaginationsrunningwild.com/preschool-winter-crafts/
Supplies Needed:
1 piece of brown construction paper
scissors
glue ( we used both a glue stick and white glue)
ribbon/yarn
goggly eyes
small pompom
brown or black marker
How To:
Cut your construction paper into 6 equal-sized strips. Mine are 2″ wide x 9″ tall.
Begin by choosing one strip of paper to turn into your reindeer’s face. Make the face first so that the pompom nose can be drying while you assemble the chain. Using your brown or black marker, draw 2 antlers. Then attach your googly eyes. My son really wanted his reindeer to be Rudolph, so he chose a red pompom (size 1.2 cm) for the nose. We used white glue to attach our nose because the glue stick wasn’t sticky enough and our nose kept falling off.
Now it is time to make your chain our of the remaining 5 strips of paper. Fold your first strip of paper into a circle and glue the ends together. Next, take your second strip and stick it through your circle. Glue the ends of the second strip together forming a circle. Repeat this process with the remaining strips of paper until all 5 pieces are connected in a chain. Once your pompom nose is dry, you can add the last of piece of paper with the reindeer face to the top of your chain.
To finish our craft, I tied a red ribbon through the top chain so we hang the paper chain reindeer craft up in our home!
This peppermint paper plate craft is fun and easy to make. Plus, you get to use your child’s handprints as the candy’s wrapper! I am a sucker for handprint crafts and I am always looking for ways for my child to personalize the crafts we make together 🙂
-glue (we used a glue stick, but white school glue is okay too)
How To:
First thing I did was show my son what a peppermint is, because he apparently had no idea that’s what those little mint candies were called! Once he got the image in his mind, his creativity took over. He came up with all sorts of ways to make the candies. We ended up making 2 paper plate peppermint crafts: one with paint and one with a color pencil spiral.
Using red paint, he painted a spiral around his plate. He started in the middle and worked his way around to the outside. It was a little difficult to paint on the ribbed part of the plate. My son had to go back and touch it up a little bit so that it looked more like a solid red line. Then we let the plate dry.
While the plate is drawing, I traced my son’s hands on white paper. Then I cut out the handprints.
My son glued his handprints onto either side of the paper plate to look like the candy’s wrapper. Using a glue stick, rub some glue onto the underside of the plate and onto the handprints to make sure that they really stick onto the plate.
Let your project dry completely before showing off your cute peppermint paper plate craft 🙂
More Winter Crafts!
Christmas Cookie Cutter Coloring: Since my waist line can’t handle too many Christmas cookies, I found another way for my kiddo to use cookie cutters: a Christmas cookie cutter coloring craft!
Make a candy cane reindeer to give out to a friend, neighbor, or family member. This reindeer craft is pretty quick and easy, but turns out so cute. Both kids and adults will love receiving one of these little reindeers. My son enjoyed making them and had a blast handing them out 🙂
Candy Cane Reindeer
Supplies Needed:
candy cane
googly eyes
pompoms
pipe cleaner
glue dots
white school glue
How To:
Pick a candy cane to decorate. Leave the plastic on the candy cane!
Pick a pipe cleaner and a pompom to use on your candy cane. My son wanted to make a “Rudolph” candy cane reindeer so he picked a red pompom for the nose 🙂
Twist the pipe cleaner around the top of your candy cane to make the antlers. Now twist the 2 ends of the pipe cleaner around your little one’s finger to make them look kind of zig-zaggy.
For the eyes, we originally just peeled off the back of the sticker googly eyes and stuck them, but we found that they did not stay on very well. So Plan B — we glued the eyes onto the candy cane with white, school glue.
Last, we attached our pom pom nose with a glue dot. I think you could also use the white glue for the nose too, but then you have to wait a while for it to dry.
And now we have a cute (and yummy) candy cane reindeer! For more crafts ideas, check out my Winter Crafts page 🙂
Here are fourteen reindeer stories to share with your preschooler this Christmas season. The stories are funny, sweet, and teach us about reindeers! Check out my list of ELF stories and SANTA books too 🙂
This is my son’s favorite reindeer story! I can’t even keep track of how many times we have read this book! This is a really cute story about a dog named Olive who hears the Christmas song saying, “All of the other reindeer,” and mistakenly thinks the song is about her. It’s almost Christmas so Olive heads out to the North Pole to report for reindeer duty! Turns out a little dog is just what Santa needed this year. Check this one out from your library and learn how Olive helps save the day!
Why we like it — it’s a sweet story and shows that everyone can contribute, no matter how small! Dot the reindeer, the smallest reindeer in the North Pole, wants to learn how to fly. Unfortunately her little legs just couldn’t take off. Feeling sad that she’s too little to fly Santa’s sleigh, Dot finds a present that dropped out of Santa’s sack. She tries as hard as she can to take flight and begins to fly! Dot reached Santa and landed in his sleigh, returning the present! Check out the companion book: The Littlest Elf.
This rhyming story is told by Comet from Santa’s team. Santa’s reindeer have a rough job of avoiding all of the traps set by the kids on Christmas Eve. Dodging flying ornaments, avoiding fake Santas, and various other traps, Comet has so much fun grooving and dancing through the neighborhood. Time is up and there are more homes to visit so Comet and the rest of the reindeer say goodbye to kids and wish them a Merry Christmas. A few reindeer facts are included at the end of the story!
Ever wonder who trains the reindeer for Santa? Well it’s Teeka’s job! Read along as Teeka tries to get the energetic reindeer to follow her directions. Teeka didn’t realize that they reindeer had their own likes and dislikes and she didn’t take their feelings into consideration. This lead to a lot of problems for Teeka as the reindeer were upset, they crashed into each, strained their muscles, and just didn’t fly like a Christmas team. Teeka learned that yelling and demanding wasn’t helping. She needed to be kind and considerate of the reindeers’ feelings and lend a helping hand. Teeka’s change in attitude improved the reindeers’ training and soon everyone was ready to fly Santa’s sleigh.
5. Reindeer Helper (Uni the Unicorn) by Amy Krouse Rosenthal–
When one of Santa’s reindeer gets lost, it is up to Uni the Unicorn to find it and help it get back to Santa! Combing unicorn and reindeer magic, Uni and the reindeer work together to catch up to Santa’s sleigh. With the sleigh missing a reindeer, it was off balance and Santa was losing presents. Good thing Uni is here! Uni and the reindeer deliver the missing presents and the lost reindeer is reunited with Santa!
My 5 year old loves this book! It has humor, sparkly magic, and Christmas, so what’s not to love! The little girl in the story gets a reindeer for her birthday, but the new reindeer and her pet unicorn aren’t getting along. Each tries to outdo the other! In the end, they put aside their feud to help Santa deliver presents 🙂
This book provides reindeer facts for your readers. Did you know that reindeer are already up and running when they are only 2 hours old?!? With cute pictures of reindeer, this book is anything but boring. Read this one with preschoolers who want to learn more about reindeers.
In this sweet Christmas story, an extremely small reindeer name Tiny is feeling sad because he is too small to help pull Santa’s sleigh. Meanwhile there is a sad little girl wishing for a small reindeer to pull the little wooden sleigh her grandfather made her. Here’s a chance for Tiny to make a big difference in someone’s life by helping the little girl! I love the moral of the story that there is always a way to help others despite our own limitations. Preschoolers will enjoy the artwork and laugh at the pictures of this super small reindeer trying to do ordinary things like eat out of an average-sized food dish.
No reindeer list would be complete without Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer! In this story (based on the movie), Rudolph is excluded from the other reindeer because his glowing red nose makes him different. What these other reindeer learn to understand is that our differences are actually assets, not hindrances. Rudolph and his nose save the day when a dense fog rolls in and none of the other reindeer can see where they are flying.
This short and sweet, rhyming board book is an ode to Sven, Kristoff’s best friend from the movie Frozen. Each page features a different character from the movie and highlights something great about them, but concludes that Sven is the best. The board book has fuzzy antlers that stick off the top, so as you turn the page, it looks like each person (or snowperson) has antlers! The book is adorable and perfect for little Frozen fans
Little Ollie, dressed in her reindeer pajamas, awakens to jingling bells outside her window. She heads outside into the snow to follow the sound, where she finds a real reindeer looking for it’s missing jingle bell collar. Ollie finds the collar abs then she and the reindeer soar up into the sky and back to Ollie’s house. Little Ollie goes back to bed while the reindeer returns to Santa’s sleigh. The lovely pictures of Ollie and the reindeer are soothing and perfect for bedtime read-alouds.
Read this rhyming story to learn why you shouldn’t race a reindeer. In addition to being very competitive, reindeer will do anything to win, even cheating! I love the moral that cheaters never prosper as the reindeer ultimately end up losing the race to the children. Check your library for this story so you and your child can giggle together over the reindeers’ antics!
This is an adorable rhyming story about a little reindeer with mismatched antlers. The little reindeer shows up as an early Christmas gift from Santa to encourage children to celebrate their own differences like just like the litter reindeer and its friends! While telling the story of Santa’s early Christmas days, little reindeer lets us in on a secret, Santa sends helpers (like the reindeer) to learn children’s real Christmas wishes and report back. The book and the plush toy come together so your little one can also have an early gift from Santa!
My son gives this book 2 thumbs up! He loves the pictures and liked that each reindeer got its own page that told about them. Not only did we learn something unique about each reindeer, but we learned the reindeers’ Christmas Eve tradition of gathering together to hear Santa read The Night Before Christmas.
This cute pup reminded me of Olive!
Thank you for checking out my list of reindeer stories for preschoolers! I hope you enjoy these books! I joined Amazon’s Affiliate program to try and help cover the costs of this site. If you buy something through one of my links on Amazon, then I get a small percentage of the sale (no extra cost to you). Thank you for your support! Happy reading 🙂
Reindeer Crafts
Paper Chain Reindeer: glue construction paper strips together to form a chain and add a cute reindeer face to the top chain.
Candy Cane Reindeer:Â make a cute and yummy candy reindeer by adding pipe cleaner antlers, googly eyes, and a pompom nose!
Christmas is just around the corner and kids are getting so excited! Help channel that excitement into some fun Christmas crafts. We rounded up our favorite 10 preschool Christmas crafts to share with you.
Preschool Christmas Crafts
10 Preschool Christmas Crafts:
Decoupage Santa Hat: make a Santa hat out of craft sticks and red tissue paper.
Christmas Owl Craft: adorable owls made from empty toilet paper rolls and construction paper.
Christmas Wreath: cute little wreath out of a paper plate that combines painting and coloring for lots of fun.
Candy Cane Reindeer: make a cute and yummy candy reindeer by adding pipe cleaner antlers, googly eyes, and a pom pom nose!
Fingerprint Snowy Tree: draw a barren tree with a marker and then your preschooler can paint on the snow with their fingerprints.
Craft Supplies:
I try to make crafts with supplies I already have at home because I hate having to put a project on hold to run to the store and get supplies. So if anytime you don’t have one of the things I mentioned, feel free to substitute it with something you have at home — there’s no wrong way to craft!
My go-to supplies are: construction paper, craft sticks (popsicle sticks), tissue paper, pompoms, Crayola glitter glue, paper plate, crayons, water color and Crayola Washable Paints, white school glue, and a glue stick. I’ve joined Amazon’s Affiliate program to help cover the costs of my site. So if you click on a product that I have on my site and buy something on Amazon, then I get a small percentage of the sale (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for support! I don’t ever recommend anything that I have not personally used and loved 🙂
Looking to incorporate more STEM education into your preschooler’s activities? Then try this fun Christmas fizz preschool STEM activity! To make this Christmas themed, we used red and green food coloring and we added red and green glitter for sparkly fun. We had a blast watching it bubble up and we loved seeing the red and green glitter sparkle in the bubbles! Play some Christmas music in the background and enjoy this holiday STEM activity together.
CHRISTMAS FIZZ
Supplies Needed:
supplies for Christmas Fizz STEM Activity
bowl or foil tray
1 box of baking soda
red and green glitter
white vinegar
2 paint cups ( we reused plastic fruit cups)
red and green food coloring
Teaspoon (for spooning the vinegar into the tray) or eyedroppers/pipettes
Prepare the Tray:
Pour baking soda inside the tray so that the entire bottom is covered
Sprinkle the red and green glitter around the tray on top of the baking soda
add baking soda and glitter
Prepare the Paint Cups:
pour vinegar in each cup
add a drop of red food coloring to one cup and a drop of green food coloring to the other cup
stir the food coloring until it is well mixed with the vinegar
Making the Christmas Fizz
Christmas Fizz
Christmas Fizz
To make the fizz, spoon some of the colored vinegar into the tray. Watch as the vinegar bubbles up when it touches the baking soda! The glitter looks awesome as the bubbles rise up 🙂
Keep spooning vinegar* into the tray until all of the baking soda is covered in red and green.
*the larger amount of vinegar that you dump into the tray at a time, the larger your fizz will be!
We love making fizz and incorporating it into our learning themes! We’ve made superhero fizz, rainbow fizz, pumpkin fizz, and winter fizz too! Just change the food coloring colors and use different glitter to make any kind of fizz you want 🙂
Using toilet paper rolls, make this cute Christmas owl craft! This craft is relatively quick and easy. It is definitely a team-work project and my son and I enjoyed enjoyed making our owls together 🙂
Measure your toilet paper roll by laying it on a red or green piece of construction paper and marking how tall your toilet paper roll is. Then wrap the paper around to see the width. Cut your paper out. This is a good opportunity for preschoolers to practice cutting straight lines. I cut our a small diamond shape out of orange paper for the beak. Then I cut two ovals out the third color of construction paper for the wings.
Once your paper is cut, it is time to decorate the wings. We used Crayola Washable Glitter Glue Pens to add sparkle to our wings. I really like this brand because it is easy to wipe up as we tend to be messy when crafting in our house. Let your wings dry. The wait time is the longest part of the craft.
While the wings are drying, glue on the large piece of construction paper. If that paper is not staying down, you can staple it onto the toilet paper roll or tape it.
Turn the front side toward you so that the seam is in the back. Squish the top of the toilet roll down by pinching the front and back and pushing them down toward the opening of the tube. This will make it look like your owl has 2 ears sticking up. Add your googly eyes and glue on your beak. To make the beak on our red owl, we folded the diamond in half so that it looked like the beak was open. On the green owl, we glued on a triangle for a beak.
We gently folded the oval wings vertically in half. Glue one side of the oval to the toilet paper roll body, leaving the other side unattached. This makes it look like the wings are sticking out from the body.
More Crafts!
To make them Christmas owls, we went with a red and green color scheme. By changing the colors of construction paper you use, you can make this owl craft for any occasion. My son already wants us to make a blue owl!
For more Christmas crafts, check out my Winter Crafts Page! There is a toilet paper roll snowman, as well as a sparkly snowflake, Santa hat, fuzzy candy cane, and more.
This candy cane craft is cute and easy for toddlers and preschoolers to make. I loved that I had all of the supplies we needed at home already. Plus, my kiddo loves using glue, so he was excited to make this craft! All-in-all, this craft was a great Christmassy way to fun with my son.
Supplies Needed:
You don’t need very many supplies so you can dive right into crafting! You will need:
-Red construction paper
-Scissors
-Cotton balls (ours were a small size)
-Glue stick
OPTIONAL: my son added googly eyes and drew on a smile with a pen
How To:
Step 1: First cut out a candy cane shape. Mine was nearly as tall as my paper and about 1 1/2 inches wide. You can make yours whatever size you want. I think the wider the candy cane craft is, the easier is is for kids to glue on the cotton balls.
Step 2: Put a line of glue across the candy cane to make your first cotton ball stripe. For younger kiddos, just glue on cotton balls; for older kiddos, stretch the cotton balls out to make the craft more interactive.
Step 3: Repeat step 2 until you have enough white stripes along your candy cane!
Step 4:Optional–add googly eyes and draw on a mouth. My son says adding googly eyes make every craft more fun!
Step 5: Let your candy cane dry before showing it off 😀
More Crafts!
Paper Plate Peppermint: a cute and festive, winter handprint craft to make with your preschooler.
Christmas Cookie Cutter Coloring: a fun way to use cookie cutters without the calories! Trace your cookie cutters like stencils to design paper cookies.
Every year I get really excited about baking and decorating Christmas cookies! My love of Christmas cookies has extended into cookie crafts and now, cookie stories:) Not all of these books are Christmas themed, so you can read about cookies all year long! Check your library for these ten books.
In this storybook-themed adventure in the “How to Catch” series, author, Adam Wallace, brings us a rhyming story of the Gingerbread Man. One day during story time, the Gingerbread Man leaps off the page of his book and takes off through the book store. The kids make a whole bunch of traps to catch him, but the Gingerbread Man’s storybook friends come to his rescue! The Gingerbread Man escapes all of the traps, but notices that the kids are sad that they can’t finish the book. The cookie leaps back onto the page so that everyone can finish the story. Grown-ups will enjoy seeing their childhood book friends come to the Gingerbread Man’s aid.
This book is so funny! Get ready to laugh your way through this updated gingerbread man story, featuring a tough cookie. Cookie claims to be a delicious sugar cookie, but he isn’t sweet and cookie isn’t fast. Cookie taunts Fox, who immediately catches Cookie. Fox tries to take a bite, but hurts his tooth! What a tough cookie! An unlikely friendship forms between the two and Fox sets out to help Cookie be his best cookie-self in this hilarious picture book.
I absolutely love Jan Brett’s books! Her illustrations are fantastic and the gingerbread baby is so cute. In this twist on the classic folktale, a family makes a gingerbread baby who jumps out of the oven and runs through town. One after another, the people and the animals give chase. The boy, however, has a plan. He bakes a gingerbread house and the cookie, looking for a place to hide from everyone, runs inside. Now the gingerbread baby lives safely inside his gingerbread house.
In this non-holiday cookie picture book, an adorable cookie recalls its struggles in school and just not feeling smart. Sometimes we all get distracted, mixed up, and frustrated, even cookies! One day, Cookie gets a school assignment to create something. It could be anything! What should Cookie make? Finally, inspiration strikes and Cookie writes a poem. The class takes turns showing what they created. Each one has a different talent. It is Cookie’s turn to share. All of the other foods love the completely original, Cookie-created poem! Cookie realizes that everyone is good at different things, and just because you aren’t good at something, doesn’t mean that you aren’t a smart cookie.
Lisa Murray’s Gingerbread Man has a whole series of adventures! In this rhyming Christmas book, the Gingerbread Man learns about the spirit of giving. The kids make cards, sing songs, and bake treats for their community. The Gingerbread Man knows just who he wants to make a card for and he sets out with his class to give their gifts. The Gingerbread Man gets separated from his class and his little cookie legs get hurt in the snow. He doesn’t give up and he hobbles up to the shop with his card to give out. Read this book to find out who the Gingerbread Man’s special card is for!
Cookies and pirates together in one sweet Christmas story! A boy and his mom make gingerbread pirate cookies for Santa. The boy’s favorite is Captain Cookie and he takes the captain to his room. After the boy falls asleep, Captain Cookie goes in search of his cookie crew, who he needs to save from being eaten by Santa! Along the way, the cookie discovers Christmas wonders and finally meets Santa himself. Captain Cookie challenges Santa in a daring attempt to save crew. Santa promises not to eat the gingerbread pirates before delivering a bit of his Christmas magic to the cookies. Pirate-obsessed and imaginative kids will enjoy this book and its magical ending!
This book is the southwest version of the famous song. The pictures are awesome and preschoolers will love the sing-songy story. Turns out it was sneaky ants who took the cookies! But don’t worry, every gets a cookie at the end. I’ve read this to the library preschool storytime group many times and they have always enjoyed it. It’s fun to play the Who Stole Cookie game after reading this. My three-year old really liked this book and since it was just the two of us, we set up some stuffed animals to be players in the game with us.
My son loves this series by Mo Willems! The pigeon is in desperate need of some manners and the little duckling is just the one to show the pigeon how to ask nicely for something. The pigeon can’t believe that duckling got a cookie just by asking nicely and saying please. Come along on the pigeon’s hilarious journey to learn to say please and thank you.
This book is a fun read! A boy gives a mouse a cookie, which leads to mouse asking for a glass of milk. After the milk, mouse wants to check his reflection in a mirror to see if he has a milk mustache. On and on it goes until mouse is thirsty again and wants another glass of milk, which makes it think of a cookie! This is a humorous story and helps preschoolers understand sequencing.
This is one of my son’s favorite books. I think we both have it memorized now! This is a super cute book about what foods farm animals like to eat. They are all very predictable except for the cow, who loves cookies! Preschoolers will love the rhyming, the repetition, and the fun sounds. Read this to find out why cow loves cookies so much. Karma Wilson is a very popular author, so your local library will probably have this book
Visit your library and checkout these cookie stories and other great cookie-themed picture books! I’ve joined Amazon’s Affiliate program to try and help cover the costs of this site. So if you buy something through one of my links on Amazon, then I get a small percentage of the sale (no extra cost to you). Thank you for your support! Happy reading 🙂
More Cookie Fun
Find the Differences: My son loves “find the differences” activities and he asked if he could design one. He made this cute gingerbread themed Find the Differences (free downloadable PDF) worksheet. Can you find all 5 differences?
Cookie Cutter Craft: We turned some of our cookie cutters into stencils and made paper Christmas cookies!
My kiddo who was anti-coloring for so long, now wants to color! And all of the time, too. So we made this fun little Christmas wreath craft together that is perfect for kids of all ages. Toddlers can scribble to their hearts’ content; preschoolers can carefully choose their colors for each pictures; and older kiddos can add glitter and sequins.
1. Cut out the center of your paper plate to make your wreath.
2. Paint your wreath green. We used water color paints, but any green paint will work. I like to use Crayola Washable Paints, but we couldn’t find them in our messy craft cabinet (grrr), so we opted for water colors.
4. Cut out your Christmas pictures. They were a little too complicated for my kiddo to cut out, so I did it. As you can see, I left a little bit of a white border around them.
5. Once your wreath is dry, arrange the pictures how you like them on your wreath and then glue them on.
6. Finish your preschool Christmas wreath craft by tying a ribbon on so that your kiddo can hang their project! I used a hole punch, but you can also just loop your ribbon through the wreath and hang it that way.
More Crafts
I love making crafts with my kiddo, and since Christmas crafts are just so cute, we’ve made quite a few together. Check out my Winter Crafts Page for more fun crafts that you and your little one can make together. We’ve traced cookie cutters and made paper cookies, decoupage Santa hats, fluffy candy canes, and more!
