The kids have been learning about Christmas traditions around the world, so I wanted to work with that for our December projects. The first project was fun, but I was able to see a lot of ways that I could improve for the next one.

First, I asked them what they've learned this week about Christmas in Germany and Australia. I read them "The Elves and the Shoemaker" since it is a German folktale. We talked about the benefits of service - how the elves used their talents to help the Shoemaker, and in return the Shoemaker and his wife made them clothes. We talked about using our art to do an act of service for someone.

I gave each child a half sheet of white paper, and had them make a pattern on it. I should have spent more time going over what patterns are and possible shapes and lines to use in their patterns, but we were running short on time because the book took longer than I thought.

Luckily, their patterns turned still turned out pretty good and the kids were really creative with them. They then cut elf legs (long rectangles) out of their patterns and glued them onto their cards with elf shoes, which I had made earlier to save time. When they finished, they wrote their cards to give to someone as an act of service.

This was a fun project, but afterwards Cindy and I talked about doing something more creative with them (not so cookie-cutter). I realized that I should have spent more time on the skill they were learning about, so I implemented that into our next project. This is how some of their elf cards turned out!