Last weekend, I watched the movie “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms” on Netflix. Christmas time is the most wonderful time of the year for me and I wanted to start having some Christmas feelings since we are finally entering into December.

I liked the movie. It has lots of magical scenes and fantasy elements. I found what I was looking for 😉 However, I don’t think it is appropriate for young children because it shows some frightening images here and there and sometimes there are lines that can give wrong messages to children.

Well, I’m not here to review the movie by the way. After the movie, the magical characters and Christmas-y feelings were still in me and I began to think “is there anything I can do with these for children?”. So I started to look for children books about the nutcracker. Here is what I found.

“The Story Orchestra: The Nutcracker”

This is a musical book. There are “Press the note” buttons throughout the book and they play Tchaikovsky’s score. The story is not too long – good for toddlers as well, and illustrations are lovely, too. So if you want to introduce the story of nutcracker to your child, I recommend this book.

Alright, now let me show you the simple art activity that I came up with for the nutcracker.

Build Your Nutcracker

Nutcracker has many small distinct features, so it is not very easy for young children to represent….!

🤷‍♀️

So, I made this “Build your nutcracker” activity.

I made some shapes that can become a nutcracker when they are put together.

*You can download this at the end of the post.

Preschoolers and kindergarteners will be able to cut the shapes out by themselves. For toddlers, you can cut them out and just ask your toddler to build a nutcracker with them.

This will make your child learn and work with different kinds of shapes and their names. Identifying shapes in real objects is a good activity to master the shapes.

Print out the nutcracker clipart. You can cut each one separately to make the activity easier.

When the nutcracker is all built with shapes and glued on another paper, your child can choose one of the coloured nutcracker clipart and colour her/his nutcracker with paints.

Watercolour paint is used here.

You can try adding mustache, too. For fun! 🥸

Talk about different colours, match the colours and practice fine motor skills by using a fine painting brush to colour.

Very simple activity but it’s a great way for young children to play with the nutcracker.

If you are working with a toddler, you can try this pattern activity, too.

Patterning with Sweets.

One of the memorable thing from the nutcracker story would be the land of sweets. I was enchanted by the colourful and cute candies in the movie. Who would not like them?!

Children can make patterns with the given colours on the sheet by colouring the rest of candies and ice creams.

If you have coloured chips, you can give chips to make patterns.

Aren’t the nutcracker story and activities perfect for the first week of December? I hope these can bring you some Christmas-y feelings as they did to me.

You can download my templates and pictures here.

Happy December!

Enjoy!

Missangela👩🏻‍🦰🎀