Simple Reindeer Painting Craft for Preschoolers
If you’re looking for fun Christmas activities to do with little kids, check out our simple reindeer craft. This reindeer art emphasizes the process over the product as well as encourages creativity and fine motor skills in little hands. So break out the craft supplies at home or in the classroom to make these fun Christmas crafts.
Try This Fun Christmas Craft
This easy reindeer painting is a fun way to learn shapes, celebrate the Christmas season, and make a cute craft with your younger kids! This is perfect for toddlers, preschoolers, and kindergarteners this holiday season if you’re looking for an easy craft that’s still pretty festive.
This post may contain affiliate links meaning I make a small commission with no extra cost to you. Read our full disclosure policy here.
Why We Love This Craft
Painting can seem like a big undertaking (read: big mess) to parents or with a classroom full of kids, but painting is a great learning opportunity for young kids! Not only does painting build fine motor skills to use painting utensils, painting is an open ended activity that spurs creativity and imagination. You can read about all the benefits as well as some tips to minimize the mess here.
Another reason we love this craft is because we love festive crafts for young children this time of year. Children love seeing projects they made up with other holiday decorations, and this cute reindeer craft is perfect for Christmas time.
Like many of the crafts we do, this one is pretty low pressure because it doesn’t actually matter if kids do it exactly right. As long as they have most of the shapes together, it comes out looking somewhat like a reindeer. It can also be adapted to older kids if multiple of your kids are doing it together.
Materials Needed
For this fun activity, you’ll need some craft supplies that you can find at your local dollar store or easily order online. Here’s everything we used:
- Brown Paint
- White Paint
- Sponges like these
- Light Blue and White Paper
- Red pom poms (we used these)
- Googly eyes
- Glue
- Small Paint Brush
To make things go smoother for the kids doing the project, you can prepare the craft ahead of time. First, cut the sponges into the shapes you’ll need for the reindeer. You’ll need a large rectangle for the body, a skinny rectangle for the legs, and a triangle for the reindeer head.
Step by Step Instructions
1. Cut Out the Snow
Have your child cut out the bottom of the white paper along a wavy line about two inches from the bottom. You can download this pdf template we used or just draw a line similar for them to follow. If your child is pretty young, you can do the cutting.
Then, glue the snow onto the bottom of the blue paper.
2. Paint the Reindeer
Have your child use the sponges you cut out to paint the reindeer. It’s easiest to do the body first, followed by the legs, and then do the reindeer’s head. The reindeer pictures may look different than ours, but that’s ok!
Then, I had my grandson add a little tail with a dot of his finger.
3. Paint the Snowflakes
Before moving on to the details of the reindeer’s face, it’s easiest to keep going with the paint. Have your child paint snowflakes coming down either with their fingers or with a paintbrush. The snowflakes can be wherever they like.
4. Finish the Reindeer Face
Lastly, add the details to the reindeer head. When the paint was dried, we glued on the googly eyes and the red pom pom for the reindeer’s nose. If you don’t want to buy googly eyes or pom poms just for this project, your child can draw them on with a marker.
Lastly, I drew some simple antlers with a brown marker.
Celebrating Creativity this Season
Remember, the benefits of this project are in the process of making it for your kids not what they look like at the end. All skill levels can complete these reindeers with it coming out looking different. But no matter what they look like, your child is the one benefitting from the process.
This is a great craft to go along with the many Christmas or winter books about reindeer as well. This fun reindeer craft can be so much fun for kids learning about reindeer this holiday season.
More Christmas Fun
We love making fun ideas and adorable decorations with kids around Christmas time. There’s tons of ideas on our website to look into for all ages of young kids. For example, try this reindeer from brown construction paper, too.
