Christmas Tree Crafts: Under the Sea

Starting in September, I led Katy's Sabbath School class and Adventurer's class, the Baby Birds, in making crafts for a tree in the Christmas Tree Forrest at the International Museum of Art and Science.  The Christmas Tree Forrest is an annual display of trees decorated according to a designated theme with entirely handmade decorations.  This year, the display includes 20 tress decorated by different groups.

Each week for three months, I planned a craft and tested it at home on Katy to make sure it was age appropriate.   Thankfully, Katy loves doing anything involving art and was therefore a very happy and willing test subject.  After weeks of making ornaments, it was finally time to decorate our tree.  Big thanks to Sylvia for spending an evening with me turning the crafts into true ornaments by adding safety pin hooks and pretty little bows

Our tree, "Primary Colors Under the Sea," turned out so colorful, full, and beautiful.

Although Katy's Sabbath School Class helped make the tree's ornaments, the Baby Birds class made most of the ornaments.  For this reason, I registered the tree under the Discovery Club name and included a placard explaining what the Discovery Club is and our club motto, "Because Jesus loves me, I will always do my best."

The placard also lists the different ornaments the kids made and what we used to make them.  I spent a lot of time thinking of different ways the kids could use different materials and mediums to decorate the tree.

Below are close up pictures of the different ornaments the kids made.  I love the variations and imperfections in the different ornaments.  It gives them loads of character.

Octopus; acrylic paint, cardstock, plastic jewels, and wiggly eyes.

Shark: paper cup, newspaper, cardstock, and wiggly eyes.  I love how the teeth turned out on these!

Whale: acrylic paint and cardstock.  The gradient color scheme of the blue paints made for such a great finished product.

Submarine: crayon, marker, cardstock, and a plastic straw.

Add caption

Jellyfish: contact paper, tissue paper, cardstock, and ribbon.  The ribbon tentacles look so neat flowing down the decorated tree.

Turtle: crepe paper, plastic plate, cardstock, and wiggly eyes.

Manta Ray: acrylic paint, cardstock, and wiggly eyes.  I like how simple these are, and the kids seemed to enjoy painting them with bubble wrap.

Fish I:  cardstock, popsicle stick, confetti, and wiggly eyes.

Fish II: markers, coffee filters, rubbing alcohol, popsicle sticks, and wiggly eyes.

Fish III: cardstock and stickers.

Snake: pipe cleaner, paper straw beads, cardstock, and wiggly eyes.

Fish Scene: watercolors, newspaper, cardstock, bottle caps, foam, sandpaper, and foil paper.

Pelican: watercolors and cardstock. I love how watercolors turn out, even when toddlers are the ones painting.

Starfish: cardstock and pom-poms.

Crab: acrylic paint, cardstock, miniture plastic cup, and wiggly eyes.

Seahorse: tissue paper and cardstock.

The tree topper includes our Discovery club mascot, a dolphin, jumping from the water and wearing a scarf as seen in our club logo.  The sun in the topper is made from the kids' handprints and turned out so cute.

I finished off the bottom of the tree with some wrinkled paper to look like sand at the bottom of the ocean.

It was fun introducing the kids to different methods of painting, as well as lots and lots of wiggly eyes.  Even better, these kids have now have their artwork on display in a museum before reaching the age of five.  They are an accomplished group of toddlers and preschoolers.  Perhaps best of all, however, our group won first place in our age category, Kindergarten to 2nd grade.  Here are some pics from the reception for the event, at which the kids received our award certificate and cash prize.

This project consumed a lot more time than I initially intended, but it was so fun and the final product is just beautiful.