Lacing Mittens Craft for Preschoolers

The house always seems so empty when we take down the Christmas decorations, and so this year, I decided that we would do a winter unit right after Christmas and make some new things to display.  This lacing mittens craft is very thrifty and great for practicing fine motor skills!

Before we made them, we first talked about what mittens are because here in Texas we don’t have to use them very often!

Jonathan was pretty impressed.

(It’s been a cold winter for us, and personally, I’m already ready for spring!)

Then we colored our mittens.  I cut them out ahead of time from some leftover mailing boxes from Christmas.  Corrugated cardboard makes an interesting surface to color on!  We colored both sides so that we can hang them up.

Jonathan (age 2) wasn’t too interesting in coloring, so I did one of his.  Once Owen saw that I was making stripes, he wanted to color stripes too!

After coloring, we took a break to read one of our favorite books – The Mitten by Jan Brett. (Amazon affiliate link)

Then we discussed the fact that mittens are usually knitted from yarn.  I told Owen that we were going to add yarn to our mittens. We have some lacing cards that he still finds difficult to do, so I decided that instead of asking him to go around the edge of the mittens, I would just punch holes all over them and let him choose his own pattern for lacing.  This worked really well.

To start, I tied a long piece of yarn to one of the holes.  Then he laced it through the holes.  I tied it off to finish.

Owen’s completed mittens:

Today we got a real dose of winter with a morning low of 10 degrees and a frozen pipe in the kitchen!  Come on, spring! (Yeah, I know I have a while to wait…)