Everyone learns quickly and remembers better when the lessons are fun and interesting. Elementary grade school art activities provide opportunities to learn colors, motor skills, topics and themes as well as writing, spelling and vocabulary in many projects. Art activities are incorporated into many different lesson plans in all subjects, from science to math to language arts. Christmas art activities include methods like painting, paper mache, collage, dioramas and other simple art techniques to express the themes and capture the feelings of the season.

Soda Straw Painting
Soda straw painting is a simple alternative painting technique that is easy and interesting for kids. Instead of a paintbrush, kids use a straw to blow paint around on the paper. They can apply color to pencil drawings of Christmas scenes, decorate ornaments or paint paper wreaths with straw painting.

Feathers
Children can use feathers to create images of the holiday. Wreaths made from circles with the centers cut out and green feathers glued on them and then decorated with red paper berries, gold stars or ornaments are a holiday art project. Ornaments from paper cut into bird shapes with feathers glued on them, Santa faces decorated with red and white feathers on caps and collars and green feathered pine trees are holiday art activities centered on images of the season.

Nesting Bags
An interesting art project involves making holiday characters on different sized paper bags that fit inside each other. Kids decorate paper bags by drawing and coloring Santa, a reindeer and a snowman on three bags--small, medium and large--using crayons or markers. When decorated, the smallest bag is filled with Christmas candy, closed up and put inside the medium bag. The medium size bag is filled with some other snack or seasonal goodies, like miniature jingle bells, closed up and put into the large bag. The finished project is a cute Christmas gift or a treat for the child to take home.

Natural Materials
Kids can use natural materials for Christmas art projects, such as pine cones, acorns, pine tree trimmings or potatoes to make stamps. Pine tree trimmings cut into small pieces and glued on to paper to assemble a Christmas tree, pine cones decorated with glitter and tiny ornaments, pine cones and acorns glued together to make Christmas mice. Potatoes cut in half and carved into stamps to use with food color on paper are interesting and challenging Christmas art activities that reflect the holiday. Other natural materials to use for Christmas art include rocks to paint, salt and food coloring to create salt art and walnut shells to create miniature Christmas dioramas.