Make a Christmas town scene from recycled materials
Home made snowy Christmas scene with twinkly lights
Want to get in the Christmas spirit but stuck at home? Why not get the whole family involved in making a really charming Christmas town scene, with snow, sparkle and Christmas magic?
You will need:
Cardboard - thick cardboard from a box is best to give your Christmas winter scene enough strength
Scissors or a craft knife (ask an adult to help)
Pencil
Coloured pens/ paints
Glue
Cotton wool
Glitter
Step 1 - design and cut out your shapes
Here you can get creative. Draw different shaped houses you might want to include. You can do houses with flat roofs or triangle roofs, lots of windows or just one or two (but make sure you do include windows on each one!). You can make short houses and tall tower blocks. Create as many as you like, but four or five will make a really nice display. You can also draw some Christmas tree shapes onto your card ready for cutting out. Again you can do trees of all sizes to make a variety in your Christmas scene.
Once you are happy with your shapes then use scissors to cut out the shapes.
Step 2 - colour and paint your houses and trees
Depending on the colour cardboard you have used, you may not need to paint or colour all of your houses. For example if you have white or brown cardboard you may want to leave them as they are, as standard house colours. You might want to colour the roof, though, or draw a Christmas wreath above the front door. Or perhaps some ivy round the doorway. Colouring the windows also makes them stand out, and if you have some white paint you can create some snow on the edges of your windows and roof.
You may choose not to keep the houses the same colour as the cardboard but instead really creative with your house colours - think of seaside pastel house colours. Or you might want to include a lot of detail, for example you could paint on a brick pattern all over the house and colour in some window sill shapes below each window.
You should also paint your trees. Why not add some Christmas detail like snow on the branches or baubles hanging from the tree?
You can also add glitter to your house to make it sparkle. Silver can be used over your 'snow' on window sills and on tree branches to make your scene really magical.
Step 3 - stick your display together
You can just put individual houses anywhere around your living space to enjoy, but we recommend that you take a long strip of cardboard and stick each of your snowy scene elements to it.
To do this you will just need to fold each tree, or house at the bottom so that you can glue it down to the base.
Once it has dried you can add a finishing touch - snow! Simply use cotton wool - tear it apart and stick pieces to the roofs and window sills, tree branches and the base of your scene.
If you have some battery operated LED fairy lights you could place these behind your house, or wind them through windows and along the base to make it really festive! Merry Christmas everyone!
A Christmas scene crafted from cardboard and cotton wool