preschool fine motor activities christmas
Christmas Crafts

Christmas Fine Motor Activities for Toddlers & Preschoolers

There are a lot of fun Christmas activities out there, but they’re not all necessarily aimed at little ones. This activity is 100% toddler orientated, with lots of fun ways to decorate a Christmas tree!

These Christmas Fine Motor Activities for Toddlers & Preschoolers are a lot of fun for little ones whilst developing those all important fine motor skills at home in a festive fun way!

I have 3 fun fine motor activities to share with you, but as always if you don’t have any of the items we have then I have lots of alternative options throughout!

preschool fine motor christmas tree

If possible, try to prepare this in advance ready for your toddler to play straight away (if your little one is into craft then they may enjoy preparing it with you as a separate activity, but you will have to wait for things to dry before you play)

Making your Fine Motor Christmas Tree Base

The Christmas Tree

As you can see from the above photo the Christmas tree is just a simple cone shape. We want to minimise the prep and maximise the play so I’ve tried to make this as simple to set up as possible.

To create the cone shape, I simply used the inside paper core of a wrapping paper tube (hopefully you’ll have one used up pretty soon!) If not, you could use a wallpaper sample or a roll of lining paper.

Roll into the widest cone shape that you can and tape on the inside.

We painted ours with some cheap green paint we already had (if you have green paper you can save some time and skip this step!)

(The paper does wrinkle up when painted, but once you’ve added the decorations you’ll never notice, and I’m sure you’re toddler will not be in the slightest bit bothered!)

Top Tip – Use a kitchen roll holder underneath your cone shaped tree as this stops it moving around when painting and also during play)

The Decorations

Once your tree is completely dry, you want to add the decoration that is going to be the basis for all your fine motor activities.

Using a glue gun (or some very strong glue!) glue some chunky pom poms all over the tree base, it’s entirely up to you how many or how big (the smaller they are the trickier the activities will be – a mixture is a good way to go if you’re not sure)

You could add a star the the top if you wanted. I was originally going to add a star attached to a straw and drop through the small hole at the top. But I wanted to keep thing simple and so I just glued one of the yellow pom poms on the top!

And there you have it, you are ready for the fun to start!

Christmas Tree Fine Motor Wrapping

Christmas activities fine motor skills

All of these activities are super simple meaning you can return to them over and over again with very little effort (this is helpful if you find your little one is just not into it the first time around which is completely normal)

For this Christmas fine motor activity it’s all about wrapping the tree in whatever you have! you could try thin strips of tinsel, wool, ribbon, some festive string like we have here or just a shoe lace (always supervise children with these items)

Encourage your child to wrap the string around the pom poms as they decorate the tree. Loop around or weave in and out – just have fun twisting and turning and creating patterns on the tree!

Decorating your Christmas - Christmas Fine Motor Skills

christmas fine motor activities toddlers

For this decorating activity we used shower curtain rings that I’ve had lying around in a drawer for some time now!

Have your child hook them on to the pom poms, layer them up, hook them on to the string you placed on earlier, or just pile them on the top of the tree – have fun with it and get creative!

If you don’t have shower curtain rings then there are lots of alternatives – you could use curtain rings, Christmas baubles (anything with a strong to hang over), mini rolls of sellotape(!), or toilet roll tubes cut into thin cylinders – anythin round basically!

Christmas Fine Motor Activities for toddlers with Pegs

christmas fine motor activities toddlers

This last idea is a little trickier as it needs your little one to be able to squeeze the pegs open to attach them to the pom poms (or the string) – it is even harder with smaller pom poms so bear this in mind when choosing the pom poms for your tree! It is a great fine motor skills activity because it really builds strength in the hand movements.

Christmas Fine Motor Activities for Toddlers & Preschoolers at Home

These ideas are all really fun, and there’s no set way to play – just let your little one have fun ‘decorating’ the tree 🙂

christmas fine motor activities toddlers

I hope you enjoy this festive activity – don’t forget to pin it for later and I’d love to know what you use to ‘decorate’ your tree with!

Louisa | Mum’s Creative Cupboard x

ps. Checkout some more Christmas activities and crafts here ↓