Craft Time: Let’s Celebrate the Arrival of Spring!
It’s springtime! Warmer weather, blossoming flowers, and outside sports have arrived. Kids get to play outside more often and for longer periods of time now that the cold, wintery weather is passing. But for those days still too chilly or everyone is stuck inside, you can still enjoy the season. One fun way to do that is with art. So for this week’s post, I have a few ideas for…
Spring Crafts!
The internet is full of crafts for flowers, bees, sunny days, Easter, animals, and more. Some provide templates to print. Others offer instructions for you to create your own. Here are four fun and beautiful crafts that you can make with your kiddos!
Easter Crafts
Whether it comes in March or April, Easter is a holiday associated with spring. Egg hunts, baby chicks, newborn lambs, and even the Biblical Easter story tends to be shown as a springtime event. So for our spring crafts, I included two that center around the Easter holiday.
Easter Egg Design
The first project is simple. What kid doesn’t like to decorate eggs? Hardboiled or plastic, food dye, tie-dye, or markers. It’s all messy fun that ends with beautiful (and sometimes abstract) creations. Pictures of eggs can be just as fun to color, too. Again, you can find them everywhere from the Internet to coloring books. Or, as I did for our craft, simply print out an empty oval and let the kids make their own patterns!
All four kiddos I care for enjoy doing art and using their imaginations. So I gave them each a blank oval and some craft supplies. Then I told them to make their own designs, however and whatever they wanted.
The youngest only wanted to color his egg with markers. The colors he chose definitely embrace springtime. He chose not to create a design but to color random sections with random colors.
The preschooler wanted to paint his. He used glitter paint to add a touch of sparkle. Much like the markers, he painted various places in whichever color he happened to be using. He then added googly eyes, which made his egg look like a silly monster!
The oldest kiddo put a little more effort into decoration her egg. She went with a solid yellow egg with darker yellow lines. To make it shine, she used clear gemstone stickers all over and added iridescent glitter around them. It’s a simple design but fitting for an Easter egg.
The artsy child created a patterned design on her egg. She drew lines to make sections and added polka dots. After coloring each section, line, and circle different colors, she placed gemstones in the middle of each dot. She also made the lines sparkle with glitter.
Want to give your child a pattern or design to follow? Here are some samples I created that you can download.
EASTER EGG PATTERNS
Three Crosses on a Hill
The reason many celebrate Easter is due to the Biblical story of Jesus dying on the cross for our sins. Part of that story is that there are two criminals crucified with him, one on each side. This creates the popular picture of three wooden crosses upon a hill.
Materials
You will only need a handful of items for this craft:
Paper plate
Three crosses – on either white or brown construction paper
Glue
Markers, paint, or crayons
Blue construction paper (optional)
Step 1
To prepare this project, cut a paper plate in half. I have found that the uncoated plates work better for coloring, especially with markers or crayons.
Draw or print out crosses, three for each child. The crosses I used are roughly 5 inches tall and 3 inches wide. They fit our plates with some room in between. You can also download the template here:
Step 2
Have your child color the paper plate green or brown. This will be the ‘hill’ that the crosses will sit on. Our plates curve upward on the outside, so we colored the bottom to give it a 3D look. If you did not make the crosses from brown paper, then have your child color them as well.
Step 3
Glue the front of the crosses to the back (or uncolored) side of the plate. They can be spread out the create an arc or all placed at the ‘top’ as long as you can see all three.
Optional Step 4
You can either display the craft at this point, or you can glue it to blue construction paper to have a sky in the background. Just glue the ‘hill’ in the middle along the bottom edge. Then color in some ‘grass’ on either side. You can add a sun, clouds, rain, or any kind of pictures that we see in the sky.
Spring Sights Crafts
Easter is not the only part of spring that can be turned into art for kids. They can make flowers in a million different ways. They can create pictures or 3D models of trees. Rainbows, gardens, butterflies, and more. So here are a couple of ideas for you and your child to try!
Paper Plate Butterflies
One of the beautiful parts of spring is seeing the emergence of butterflies looking for food within freshly blooming flowers. Kiddos love to chase (and maybe catch!) them. Even adults will spend hours watching the fluttery insects. Though I’ve never seen a butterfly this big in nature, we decided to create some using paper plates!
Materials
The supplies you will need are:
Paper plates (one per butterfly)
Scissors
Markers/crayons/paint
Pipe cleaners (one per butterfly, cut in half)
Glue
Decorations
Step 1
The first step is to color and decorate the plates. These will be the wings, so typically the two halves should be symmetrical. Younger children might not understand this concept, so let them use their imaginations with it.
Step 2
Glue the two halves together in the middle of the rounded edges. I turned mine slightly so that the bottom is closer together than the top. You can glue them perfectly aligned if you prefer.
Step 3
Fold one half of the pipe cleaner in half. Then twist it around one end of the other half. I also bent the longer half over the folded one just to help keep it together. Glue the longer half to the center of the ‘wings’ with more sticking out at the top than the bottom.
And that’s it! Let the glue dry completely, then display your colorful spring creations.
Fingerprint Flower Garden
Flowers blooming in the spring adds even more beauty to the time of year. Whether it be your neighbor’s flower garden or the weeds growing along the side of the road, flowers add color to the landscape. After the drab winter brown and white, it’s a welcome sight.
They also make fun craft projects. You can use actual flowers to paint, do chalk or crayon rubbings, and create springtime pictures. Or, as we did, you can make your own flowers!
Materials
For this project, you will need:
Blue and green construction paper
Scissors
Glue
Paint
Plate or tray to pour paint onto
Paint brushes (optional)
Preparation
Before you begin, cut a strip of green paper 1-2 inches thick from the longer side of the paper. Also cut strips of green paper 3-4 inches long x ¼ inch wide. If you’d like, you can also cut out leaf shapes to add to the stems.
Step 1
Have your child cut strips into the long piece of green paper that go ¾ across. This makes the ‘grass.’ If your kiddo isn’t ready to use scissors yet, then this step can be part of the preparation. The strips need to be narrow enough to look like grass.
Step 2
Glue the grass, stems, and leaves to the blue paper. We placed our stems first, spread across the page, so the grass hides the bottoms. The leaves can be anywhere on the stems. My girls put their leaves at the same height on opposite sides of the stems. My boys staggered their leaves. Let your child decide where and how many leaves go on theirs.
Step 3
Now it’s time to get messy! Have your child paint one fingerprint at the top of each stem. This will be the center of the flowers. Then let them paint fingerprints around it to make the ‘petals.’ The petals can either all be the same color, as my youngest did, or each flower a different color like both of my girls did.
Step 4
Add decorations! All four of my kids wanted a sun and clouds in their skies. The girls also added other details such as Easter eggs and a hot-air balloon. Other suggestions would be birds, trees, a fence surrounding the garden, or maybe a house or shed.
I hope you and your child enjoy these fun springtime crafts! If you do one or all of them, share your creations in the comments below!
