Preschool Crafts

This morning I held a Preschool Craft program for ages 3-6.  This is an important age group to remember because many of these kids do not fit into our baby and toddler story times and are too young for our school age programs.  You wouldn't think so, but it is one of our hardest age groups to schedule here.  We registered 20 kids to come in and do an assortment of fall crafts.  Fall in Michigan means mild temperatures and colorful leaves.  On the morning of the program, we woke up to this:

I guess that fall now means snow.  We had three crafts set up at three different stations.  Supplies and examples were set out at each table so kids could work on these projects with little adult "assistance".

"Before" picture

Craft 1: Colorful Trees

This station required stamp pads in red, yellow, orange, and brown, a paper with a tree trunk drawn on it, and baby wipes.  Kids use their fingers to make the leaves by putting them in ink, then on the paper.  If you do something similar, look for inexpensive washable ink as kids like to mix the colors and the stamp pads may not be reusable.

I put brown craft paper down on the table as there were a lot of ink prints that ended up on the craft paper.  This makes it much easier to clean up!

Craft 2: Leaf Wreathes

For this station, we used paper plates with the middles cut out, glue sticks, die cut leaves, and a piece of yarn to hang the wreath.

Craft 3: Turkeys

This station was my favorite as it was neat to see what the kids' designs.  We used colored tissue paper squares and glued them onto half of a paper plate.  If you do this, it helps if you put the glue on the plate, not on the tissue paper.  When they finished their "feathers", they took a plastic baggie that included all of their turkey parts.  They glued these onto the turkey to create their finished product.

While the snow made some people cancel for today's program, we still ended up with a good sized group.  Almost all of them left the program asking when we could do this again!