Five little elves went out one day, and hopped up into Santa’s sleigh! Santa Claus said “ho, ho, ho, ho!” And all of the five little elves said, “Go!” 

This crafty play set is inspired by one of our favorite Super Simple Christmas songs: Five Little Elves! If you have this song playing on repeat in your home during the holiday season, this one’s for you! With some help from our Santa’s sleigh printable and some recycled items you probably already have around the house (hello, tissue box and cardboard tubes), you’ll be playing along to the song in no time! 

PRO TIP: This song and play set is also great to practice counting! Try counting how many elves are in the sleigh. Or ask, how many are outside the sleigh? Any holiday craft that doubles as an educational tool is a Santa-slam-dunk! 

Let’s get busy crafting, little elves! First we’ll go through how to make Santa’s sleigh, then we’ll move on to how to make the cardboard tube elves. 

Things You’ll Need

• 6 cardboard tubes
• 1 tissue box
• Our Five Little Elves Play Set printable for Santa’s sleigh – either full color or print this coloring page version to color your own!
• Craft paint
• Paintbrush
• Ribbon
• Yarn
• Construction paper
• Ruler
• Scissors
• Glue stick
• Clear tape
• Glue gun
• 5” bowl, or something else circular to trace
• Small pom poms
• Small googly eyes
• Black marker
• Small buttons, to decorate

Steps

Let’s start with Santa’s sleigh! 

We are making Santa’s sleigh from a tissue box! You can also use our handy Santa’s sleigh printable to make your sleigh look just like the sleigh from the Five Little Elves music video. You can print it in full color or print the coloring sheet version to add your own colors to Santa’s sleigh!

Use scissors to carefully away to top of the tissue box. 

Use red paint and a paintbrush to paint the small ends of the tissue box red. 

Cut out the sleigh from the Five Little Elves Play Set printable! If you printed the coloring sheet version be sure to color it in first! 

Glue the cut outs to either side of the tissue box. TIP: For smaller tissues boxes, line up the top of the sleigh to the top of the box, then fold the leftover at the bottom underneath the box and glue it into place, or cut it away. 

Now your sleigh is ready! Let’s make the little elves to go inside! You can make as many as you like, and decorate them all differently to make them unique. We recommend making at least five so you can play along with the song Five Little Elves. Here’s how to do it!

Paint the top of your cardboard tube with various skin-toned shades of paint and set them aside to dry.  

To make the elf’s clothing, cut a strip of construction paper about ⅔ of the height of the cardboard tubes. 

Once it is cut out, you can trim the length so it wraps around your tube once.

Glue the strip into place and use a piece of clear tape for added security. 

Trace your 5” bowl, or something else circular, onto construction paper to make a perfect circle, then cut it out. 

Cut the circle in half. 

We are going to use one half of the circle to make an elf hat! Gently twist the paper into a cone shape and fold the edges inward to find the perfect size to fit on top of your cardboard tube. Use a glue stick to glue the overlapping paper in place to make your hat! Secure it with a piece of tape. You can add glue to the top of the hat to add a small pom pom, and use ribbon wrapped around the hat to decorate it. TIP: Use the other half of the circle to make a hat for another elf!

To make the elf’s belt, cut a strip of ribbon long enough to wrap around the elf and glue into place. To make the belt buckle, cut out a square of yellow paper. Fold it in half and cut away the inner square. Glue it in place onto the belt. For the collar, cut a piece of ribbon and trim the ends at an angle. Add a small button or pom pom with glue to dress it up.  

Now let’s make our elf’s ears, a very important step! To make the ears, draw the shape you would like for your ears on either side of the head. Then cut down from the top of the tube along this line and gently fold the ears forward!

To add the elf’s hair, use a glue gun to trace glue around the top of the heads and the behind ears. Stick the yarn in place and fill in the center of the head with squiggles of yarn.

We are almost done! To finish our elf’s face, add some small googly eyes with your glue gun. Draw a nose and mouth with your black marker, and you can also add a little dot of pink paint to make rosy cheeks. 

This elf is ready for a ride in Santa’s sleigh! 

You can make the rest of the elves and Santa by following the same instructions. For Santa, simply use red paper to make Santa’s hat and coat. We also added a white wooly beard to his face using some white wool and the glue gun. Santa will want some rosy cheeks and we also added a small pink pom pom for his nose! 

Are you ready little elves? Let’s go for a ride! Follow along to the song Five Little Elves as you play! Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

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Find other Super Simple Christmas videos, craft, activities, and more!

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The bubble snake is a super fun and simple way to up your bubble game! It’s easy to make, using items you probably already have around the house, and it provides tons of fun for little ones. You can use the bubble snake outside, or try using bath friendly soaps for an exciting experience during bath time! See the bubble snake in action in the Caitie’s Classroom episode Staying Clean & Healthy – Caitie shows us how the bubble snake makes bathtime so much fun! 

Things You Need 

• sock 
• dish soap (for outside use) or bath friendly soap (for bath use)
• small dish with water 
• rubber bands 
• small empty water bottle 
• craft knife 
• scissors 

Steps

Using a craft knife, pierce a hole at the bottom end of a water bottle. Cut into the hole with scissors, and continue cutting around the bottom until it comes off. 

Pull a sock over the bottom opening of the bottle. Make sure you have about 2” of sock from the bottom of the bottle, and cut off the excess. Secure the sock in place with rubber bands.

Mix some dish soap with water in a small dish so the soap is diluted. Dip the sock end of the water bottle into the soap mixture. Blow out through the mouthpiece of the water bottle to make your bubble snake! 

Have fun! How long can you make your bubble snake? Can you make it slither like a snake in the air? Try it in the bathtub for extra bubble fun! 

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Let’s get ready to rock..with a homemade guitar! This little guitar might look fancy, but it’s surprisingly simple to put together, and is made with things you probably already have around the house! Little music lovers will love having their very own guitar to play, and friends of Caitie can play along as Caitie plays guitar and sings. You can explore different sounds by using different rubber bands, and decorate your guitar any way you like. Be sure to check out the Caitie’s Classroom episode all about Musical Instruments to see Caitie make the craft, and to explore other amazing instruments and the sounds they make!

Things you’ll need

For the guitar:

• Tissue box 
• Cardboard paper towel tube 
• Rubber bands – use different sizes and thickness for different sounds!
• Scissors 
• Craft knife 
• Craft paint 
• Paint brush 
• 4 Popsicle sticks 
• Glue stick 

Decorations:

• Pom poms 
• Decorative tape 
• Stickers 

Steps 

We are going to use a tissue box as the body of our guitar. First, remove the plastic parts from the opening of the box, and then paint the outside of the box. You can paint it any color you like – we used the color blue. You may need to paint a few layers to cover the pattern of your box, then leave it to dry.

We are going to use a cardboard paper towel tube for the neck of our guitar. Paint the tube any color you like – we painted it brown to look like a traditional guitar neck. Leave your tube to dry.

Assemble

Pick the side of the guitar that your neck will come out of – if you are right handed the neck will come out of the right side of the guitar when looking down at it. If you are left handed (like Caitie!) the neck will come out of the left side of the guitar when looking down at it. Hold the end of the cardboard tube to the side of the guitar body and draw two parallel lines the same width as the end of the tube but slightly closer together than the width of the tube. Connect the lines together with another line making an H shape.

With a craft knife, carefully cut along the lines and push the two tabs inwards. The hole should be slightly smaller than the tube so the tube will fit snugly in the hole without any other support. Then insert the tube into the hole to make your neck!

We are going to use rubber bands for our guitar strings! Most guitars have six strings, but we are using four strings which is a little more like a ukulele, another great instrument!

Add the strings by stretching them around the box, moving them over the opening in the guitar body as best you can. We put two strings on either side of the neck. Experiment with different sizes and thickness of rubber bands for different sounds!  To help our guitar sound better, we have to move the strings off the body of the guitar. To do this, glue two popsicle sticks together to make them a little thicker, then slide them under the strings and push them to either side of the guitar body.

Decorate

Now your guitar is built, and it is time to decorate! 

The lines on the neck of a guitar separate the frets. We used colorful tape and wrapped it around the neck to mark the frets. We used pom poms for the tune pegs, and decorated the body with stickers and gems!

Now you are ready to rock out with your guitar! Cue up Caitie and play along with her and her guitar!

For more fun with musical instruments, check out our theme page for making music filled with videos, activities and crafts for making music with little learners! 

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Families come in all different sizes, and each one is unique. This craft using cardboard tubes can be customized to be like your family, or you can use your imagination and make an entirely different family! No matter what your cardboard tube family looks like, make sure to make it with lots of love.

What you’ll need:

• cardboard tubes
• scissors
• yarn for hair
• craft paint
• paint brush
• construction paper or patterned paper
• googly eyes
• glue stick
• black marker
• small buttons

Steps:

With scissors, trim the cardboard tubes into different sizes – longer for the adults and shorter for the children.

Paint the skin tone of your family on 1/3 of the tubes, and let it dry.

For the shirt, line up a strip of coloured or patterned paper to the tube, and trim to size. With a glue stick, wrap and glue the paper into place. You could also use craft paint for the shirt instead of paper, and paint on the tube.

Decorate the shirt by glueing buttons, ribbon, beads or stickers.

Glue the eyes in place, and draw a nose and mouth with a black marker.

For the hair, wrap yarn around your hand. Cut a small length and tie the bundle together at the centre. Trim folded ends or leave folded for a curly hair look. Glue a few strands to the tube to hold into place.

You can make the cardboard tubes to look like your family, or you can create a whole new family to play with!

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There is something magical about building a snowman: rolling big snowballs, piling them up one on top of the other and choosing just the right accessories! Don’t let the cold prevent you from building a snowman. Even if it’s made out of paper, it can still have all the classic attributes – while keeping its whimsical snowman charms.

Things you’ll need

• Blue, black, red and orange cardstock paper
• Bubble wrap paper
• White paint
• Paintbrush
• Scissors
• Glue
• Googly eyes
• Ribbon
• Black marker
• Small pom poms
• Hole punch
• Pipe cleaner
• Craft stick

Start by applying a layer of white paint onto the bubble wrap paper. Some kids may prefer to use their fingers while others will go for the paintbrush or sponge brush. Place the bubble wrap on top of the blue cardstock paper and press down all over to transfer the paint. Slowly peel off the blue paper and set it aside to dry.

Once the paint is dried, use a cup or any other round household item to draw three circles on the blue cardstock paper and cut them out.

Glue them together in a row, slightly overlapping them.

Cut out accessories for your snowman: a hat, nose, and scarf. We used ribbon for the scarf and googly eyes for the eyes, but you can cut these out of paper, too. If you choose to do this, use black paper for the eyes and colorful paper for the scarf. Glue pom poms on your snowman’s body to make some fun buttons.

Draw a smiling mouth and add some googly eyes.

Use a hole punch to make two holes in the middle circle, one on each side. Slide a pipe cleaner through the holes. Glue the snowman to a jumbo craft stick. If you have used card stock paper to make your snowman puppet, you can glue the craft stick only to the back of the bottom circle. The snowman will be sturdy enough not to fall back or front. If you used construction paper, make sure to glue more of the snowman to the craft stick, but remember to leave some wood stick exposed so kids can easily hold their puppet.

Learning about snow and winter? Check out this episode of Caitie’s Classroom called Spectacular Snow!

Listen to I’m A Little Snowman while making your craft!

Our Top 10 Christmas Crafts are listed here!

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When we think about magic, we think about enchanting fairies sprinkling fairy dust as we slumber in our beds. Taking a close look at the miniature world of fairies can be a fun way to start talking to kids about respecting all forms of nature, be it big, small and even teeny tiny. Thinking about fairy worlds can really work out our creative thinking muscles, too. What kind of food would fairies find? How could they use an acorn? What kind of house does a fairy live in? We can have fun talking about fairies together. 

This fairy house DIY night light makes the perfect craft time activity, gift or homemade decor piece for a child’s bedroom. (We also wanted to point out that there is no glitter involved, wink wink! However, if glitter makes you happy you can absolutely decorate your house however you like.)  We know the fairies in your house will love their new home. Let’s get started! 

Things you’ll need 

• Glass Jar 
• Marker 
• Felt in assorted colors
• Scissors
• White glue and a paintbrush that can be used for glue 
• Battery operated tea light or small twinkle lights 
• Bottle caps, one large and one small 
• Plate or bowl
• Optional: glow in the dark paint

First, wrap a piece of felt around your jar and trim the height and width.

Next, trace your small bottle cap on the felt in several places to make some round windows and the arch of the doorway. 

Cut these shapes away.  

To make your door and window trim, trace the large, then small bottle caps on a new color of felt of your choice. You can use the cut away door as a template by tracing it onto the felt and drawing around it. 

Cut out these shapes.

Glue the trim in place by painting on the glue with a paint brush.

Turn your felt piece over and glue strips into the window to make little window panes.

Paint glue onto the back of the entire piece of felt and wrap it around your jar.

To make your fairy house roof, trace a plate or bowl onto a piece of felt. Choose a magical color! Loosely cut out the circle to make a natural looking mushroom shape.

Cut a straight line from the edge to the centre of your circle. Layer both of the edges to make a peak. Glue the overlapping edges together.

You can decorate your mushroom rooftop with felt circles or get creative!

Cut a strip of green felt long enough to wrap around the bottom of the jar. Trim some grass texture and glue it in place.

Add some tiny little felt flowers for extra color.  

Optional Step: 
Paint some glow in the dark paint inside the jar behind the windows and doorway to give the house an extra glow and conceal any no-heat lighting you use inside.

Place a no-heat battery operated tea light inside the jar. You can use any battery operated, no-heat led light.

Admire your creation and get ready for some fairy visitors!

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We love dioramas! It’s a wonderful opportunity for little’s imaginations to run wild and create a whole new world. In this diorama, we created an underwater scene with sea creatures and underwater plant life using a shoe box as our blank slate. You can give your little ones a blank slate, like a shoe box, along with a few craft supplies and verbal prompts, and see what they come up with! It doesn’t have to be perfect, the important thing is little ones are getting in some tactile learning and either using their imagination or what they know about different environments. Here are some details on how we made our underwater diorama.

What You Need

• Shoe box, or any kind of box
• Tape
• Thread 
• Construction paper
• Scissors

For decorations:

• Pipe cleaner  
• Underwater itesm: Stones, sand, seashells 
• Pom moms 

Steps 

We fit, cut and glued a paper background for the water and sand. You can also use paints and paint a background. Just let it dry before moving on!

We made some coral mounds to create some depth to our scene out of construction paper. To do this, fold the bottom 1/4”of the mound to make a spot to glue it into your box in different places.

We made some other underwater plant life by cutting out different plant shapes from construction paper and decorating them with markers.

We also made some neat underwater plant life by folding pipe cleaners to look like coral.

Pom poms make great underwater items too! We glued on some smaller pom poms to a big pom pom so it looked like colorful coral pieces.

For our underwater diorama we made some colorful fish. Using markers, draw and cut out your fish shape and add some googly eyes. You can cut out the shape of any underwater animal you like! Just make sure you decorate your animal on both sides – once they are hung up they can spin around. Add some googly eyes.

Tape a piece of thread to the top of your animal to hang from the top of the box.

Put it all together! It’s easiest to work from the back of the box to the front. We glued our underwater plants to the front and the back of the coral mounds to keep them in place. Then glue on any other items you have to the bottom, like seashells or sand.

Finally, hang your underwater animals by taping the thread to the top of the box. 

Time to explore, let’s dive in and go on an underwater adventure! Glub glub! This is a great activity for an underwater theme, explore sea creatures, or to learn about different environments where animals live. You can make all kinds of dioramas! Try making one for a desert environment, or a jungle. Though we admit…underwater dioramas are our favorite. There is just so much to explore underwater! Have fun, everyone!

Watch Caitie make this craft in Caitie’s Classroom – Underwater Animal Adventure! 

For lots more underwater animal activities and craft, check out our sea creatures themed page.

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Camping is a wonderful summer activity! Sleeping in a tent in the great outdoors, enjoying swimming and canoeing, bird watching, rock hunting, and of course, the campfire. A campfire is a wonderful source of heat to cook food, and light so we can see once the sun goes down, and it is very beautiful to look at. One of our favorite camping activities is sitting around the campfire and singing our favorite songs. With this campfire craft, you can enjoy a beautiful campfire inside at any time and in any weather. It’s great for playing camping indoors, and it’s lots of fun to put together too. Let’s get started!

Things You Need

• 3 large and 3 small cardboard tube rolls 
• Hot glue gun 
• Tissue paper – red, yellow, and orange (one sheet each) 
• Plastic fork, or a fork you don’t mind using with paint 
• Brown craft paint, two different shades (you can always add some white or black to your one brown shade to make a lighter or darker shade)
• Construction paper – beige or light brown 
• Brown marker  
• Scissors 
• Paint brush

Steps 

Paint the cardboard tubes with the lighter shade of brown craft paint. Leave them to dry.

Once dry, you can create a wood texture by dipping your fork into a darker brown paint and running the fork along the length of the tube. Continue until the tube is covered and it looks like bark!

As an alternative to this step you can use a brown maker to draw lines. You can also create a darker shade of brown paint by adding some black paint to the brown and mixing.

With a brown marker, trace a circle onto your construction paper. We used a bottle cap, but the ends of your cardboard tubes will work well too! Next, draw the growth rings of a tree inside of the circles, this will make your tubes look more like logs! Cut out all the circles, one circle for each end of your cardboard tubes.

Glue the ends of the log by adding 4 small drops of hot glue to the end of the tube, and stick the circle on.

To make the fire, fold a sheet of tissue paper from each color in half and layer the sheets on top of one another. Then cut the layers in half to make two squares, and cut the squares on a diagonal from corner to corner to make triangles. Finally, layer the triangle shapes and bunch them together at the base. Secure the base of your tissue paper fire with tape so it holds together at the bottom.

Now it’s time to build the campfire! Put the three large tubes together leaving a small space in the centre. The small space will help to hold your tissue paper fire. Glue the logs in place with a hot glue gun. Then add the smaller tubes to fill in-between the large logs and glue in place.

Place the bottom bundles of your tissue paper fire in-between the tight log spaces. They should hold in place on their own!

Now you are ready to sing your favorite campfire song, or pretend to roast marshmallows! You can add some marshmallows to the end of sticks or a dowel and roast away! But with this campfire, you’ll never burn your marshmallows… or your mouth!

We hope you have a super fun pretend camping trip! 
Watch Tobee and Caitie Go Camping! They roast marshmallows and sing one of their favorite songs around a real campfire.

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Once all the yummy yummy pizza is gone, the games can begin! This super fun bean bag toss game is made from a leftover pizza box and homemade bean bags. It is a great way to recycle your pizza boxes, and a fun way to practice colors, numbers and shapes as you play. Not to mention those gross motor skills! 

This pizza box bean bag toss game requires a lot of grown up help to make, some steps are only for grown ups. But little ones will love playing with it!

You will want to clean out your pizza box as best as you can. If you can’t get your pizza box as clean as you would like, ask your local pizza shop for an extra box the next time you order pizza – that’s what we did!

Things you’ll need

Pizza Box Game

• Pizza box – a small sized pizza box works best
• Utility knife 
• Pencil 
• White glue 
• Chopsticks or large popsicle sticks 
• Craft paint, markers and/or foam number stickers to decorate

Homemade Bean Bags

• Scissors 
• Socks 
• Rice 
• Elastic bands 

With a pencil draw the shapes you will cut out onto your pizza box. Carefully cut out the shapes using a utility knife. This part is just for the grown ups. You can cut different shapes, like we did, or cut all one shape. We like using different shapes because you can practice shape recognition as you play!

Decorate the box with your craft paint, markers or stickers! You can decorate your toss game any way you like! You can give each shape a number if you plan to count points. For our toss game, we made the square worth one point because it is the easiest shape to toss the bean bag into, and the triangle worth three points because it is the hardest. You can use different numbers to practice more numbers and counting as you play, as well as different colors to practice colors. 

Glue one side of your chopsticks or popsicle sticks to the inside of the front bottom corners, one on each side. Glue the tops of your chopsticks or popsicle sticks to the inside of the lid where they prop the lid of the box open.

To make the bean bags, scoop about one cup of rice to a sock. Make sure all the rice gets into the bottom of the sock, and then tie it off  tightly with an elastic band. Trim off the top of the sock that is left over with scissors.

Now you are ready to play! Toss away and try your best! You can also pick a shape/color/number to aim for and keep trying until you make it. Keep mentioning the different shapes/colors/numbers on the toss game for more fun practice of these vocabulary words.

Watch Caitie play with her Pizza Box Bean Bag Toss Game in the classroom during the episode Yummy Yummy Pizza!

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Three, two, one…blast off! This flying rocket ship craft is simple to make, and fun to play with! There are lots of great learning opportunities for little ones when making this craft – you can ask them what colors they want to make their rocket ship to practice color vocabulary, point out the different shape cut outs that are used on the rocket ship, and practice numbers with a big countdown! Plus it looks really great! Let’s get ready for lift off!

Things you’ll need

• craft paint
• cardboard tube
• paint brush
• glue stick
• tissue paper
• two sheets construction paper (any color!)
• bowl about 6” wide (for tracing a perfect circle)
• pencil
• tape
• straw (we used a paper straw)
• scissors

Steps

1. Paint your cardboard tube the color you would like for your flying rocket ship and then set it aside to dry. This part of a rocket ship is called the body tube!

2. The bottom part of the rocket is called the fins! To make the fins, trace half of the bowl to make a half circle on a piece on construction paper. Then move the bowl down the page, and trace half of a circle again to make a crescent shape. You’ll need two of these shapes. Then cut them out!

Take both pieces and fold them in half to find the centre. Unfold, and cut a line halfway up the folded centre line on one crescent, and make a cut half way down on the other.

Carefully bring the two crescent shapes together by inserting one into the other using the cuts you made.

Using scissors, cut four 3” slits into one end of the paper tube, evenly spaced out. Then carefully slide the crescent shapes into the slits on the paper tube. Now you have your fins!

3. The top part of the rocket ship is called the nose cone! To make the nose cone, trace a circle onto a piece of construction paper and cut it out.

Then, cut away a 1⁄4 pie piece off of the circle.

Roll the paper up to make a cone, then tape and glue together.

Add glue to the top of the cardboard tube’s rim so you cansecure the cone into place. Add extra tape underneath to make it extra secure!

4. Now let’s add some flames to our flying rocket! Cut long triangle shapes from tissue paper. We used red, yellow and orange tissue paper to best show the flames. You can cut all the triangles you need at the same time by stacking the tissue paper together.

Cut out a strip of construction paper, and glue the triangles to the strip. Make sure you glue the bottom of the triangle to the strip of paper. Add glue to the bottom of the rocket ship and glue the strip along the outer edge.

5. For the finishing touches, cut out some circles to make some windows! We traced a bottle cap and found that to be the perfect size for a rocket ship window. You can also use decorative tape, strips of paper, buttons or stickers… anything you like to decorate your rocket ship and make it your own!

To make your rocket fly you can add a straw as a handle. Carefully pierce a hole into your cardboard tube with a pencil and glue a straw into place using hot glue.

Now your rocket ship is ready for take off! Three, two, one….

If you had fun blasting off into space with this craft, we would love to see your pictures! Please share your craft photos with us on Instagram, Facebook or send them through our website.

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