Christmas Trees

The students have been working on Christmas crafts during art this last unit. We've made snowflakes (the traditional fold into a triangle, cut, then open to see what happens), Christmas cards, and Christmas trees. I saw a little girl's shirt that had this basic design in ribbon and decided to try it out in paper! Everyone loved it! It took most students about 45 minutes to an hour (over a two day period).

This is a first or second grade example, I'm not sure which, beside the inspiration, so cute!

Supplies needed:

Black piece of 9" x 12" construction paper

Green piece of 9" x 12" construction paper

Brown piece of construction paper: 1" x 2" or 2" x 2"

glue

Any extra pieces of paper/decoration you may want to add. A few of my older students added little ornaments, snow (white crayon), presents, etc.

Fold the green paper in half. Cut 1"-2" strips of paper along the fold (my pieces were quite irregular - no measuring involved and I told the students not to worry about exactness either, when have you seen a natural tree that was exact? Not very often!). Unfold the strips of paper and cut them along the fold.

You will need 10 of the half pieces. Fold each of these into a loop and adhere the ends together with a very small amount of glue and hold tight for a few seconds (my little ones count to 20). Then glue them in rows as shown in the picture. The star is just two triangles put together. I figured this would be the easiest for the students to create. The trunk is a piece about 1" x 2" or 2" x 2" brown construction paper.

Have fun!