Decorating unfinished wood dreidels make for a fabulous wood dreidel craft for Chanukah party activities, at home, or in the classroom. If you loved this, check out my paper dreidel templates too. This post contains affiliate links.

Last year, Woodpeckers sent me a surprise Hanukkah gift package – including some of their wooden dreidels. I knew right away that this had to be the main event of our family Chanukah party.

To make this wooden dreidel craft with the family, we simply put out a blank dreidel for each participant. We spread letters cut on the Cricut out, along with dollar store metallic markers. Everyone had so much fun making these!

You don’t need to cut letters on the Cricut. If you don’t have one, you can simply purchase aleph-bet stickers (just make sure you have enough of these four letters for all participants), or include a photo of the letters for reference and encourage crafters to illustrate it on their own.

The stickers can be left in place or used as a resist.

While some guests did not place the letters in the correct order, it’s totally fine. They had a blast creating them and playing with them. And they loved the high quality “real” dreidels they got to work with.

It made for a fabulous take-home and keepsake. And it doubled as a doodle-on-the-tablecloth activity too, as you can see!

Which paint or markers to use for unfinished wood dreidels

The kids in question by our party were either mine, dressed in clothing we didn’t mind ruining, or old enough to be responsible with permanent markers. That’s another huge advantage of this wood dreidel craft: it’s diverse in age appeal too!

However, if you’re crafting with younger kids, you’ll probably prefer something kid-friendly, such as tempera paint sticks. My favorites are OOLY Chunkies or Kwik Stix (they make a thin version too.) I don’t recommend using actual paint for this, since it’s not a flat project so kids will make a huge mess of it.

You also always want something fast drying at a party.

At the party itself, I used dollar tree metallic markers. They’re cheap, and while their lifespan is very short, I only needed them for the day.

Of course, when it came time to writing this post, I couldn’t find the photos I had taken, so I had to recreate it. (Once I was done re-crafting I promptly found said photos).

When I redid it, I used Posca markers. The quality is so much better.

In a nutshell: for little kids, paint sticks from a good brand are recommended. For responsible or slightly older kids, paint markers are fab. Which ones depends on how much you care about quality.

How to make this wood dreidel craft

What you need

Paint markers
Unfinished dreidels
Nun, Gimmel, Hey, Shin (or Pey) stickers made using a Cricut and any vinyl OR purchased aleph-bet stickers with enough for each crafter to get a nun, gimmel, hey, and shin (or pey)