Paper Plate Christmas Wreath
Cut the middle out of a paper plate and you have a wreath that takes any decoration you like.
- Age
- Ages 3–8
- Prep
- 5 min
- Play time
- 25 min
- Mess
- Medium
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Where
- Indoor
Why kids love this
It is a big craft. Most things a child makes are the size of a postcard; this one is the size of their head and it goes on a door where visitors see it, which matters more to a five-year-old than any amount of technique. And because the ring is just a ring, there is no right way to fill it. Two children doing this side by side produce completely different objects, which is unusual.
What you'll need
- A paper plate
- Green paint or green paper torn into pieces
- Glue
- Red paper, buttons or pom-poms for berries
- Ribbon to hang it
- Scissors (for the adult)
How to do it
-
Cut the middle out of the paper plate to leave a ring about two inches wide.
-
Paint the ring green, or glue on torn green paper until none of the plate shows.
-
Let it dry  properly, or the berries slide.
-
Glue red berries around the ring, spaced out rather than clustered at the bottom.
-
Tape a loop of ribbon to the back and hang it up.
Make it easier
Tear the green paper into pieces beforehand. Tearing is good for hands but it is slow, and a three-year-old runs out of patience before the ring is covered.
Make it harder
Set a pattern rule  three green, one red, all the way round  and see whether it survives the whole circle. Keeping a pattern going around a curve is harder than in a line.
Other ways to play it
- Handprints in green cut out and glued round the ring make the leaves, which is a nice record of the year.
- A white plate with silver and blue is a winter wreath rather than a Christmas one.
- Thread real ribbon in and out of holes punched round the ring for a threading activity built into the craft.
What they're learning
Covering a ring completely means working round a curve and noticing gaps, which is more spatial reasoning than it looks. Spacing the berries evenly is early estimating.
The paper plate wreath is the most forgiving of the crafts for kids in this collection. There is no stage where it can go wrong  a ring covered in green paper is a wreath whatever else happens to it.
We like it as one of the Christmas crafts for kids to do on the first weekend of December, because it goes straight up on a door and marks the start of everything else. It also empties the scrap drawer, which by December is usually full.
Cutting the centre out is the one adult job. After that it is entirely theirs, which is what earns it a place on any list of easy Christmas crafts for kids  you can set it going and walk away.
It sits well alongside quieter Christmas activities for kids on the same afternoon: this one is big and messy and finished fast, so it pairs with something that needs sitting still. Of all the kids Christmas crafts here it is the one most likely to be made twice, because the second one is always better than the first.