Craft Time: It’s Going to Get a Little Stormy!

To many, spring arriving means flowers blooming, warmer weather, seasonal allergies, and outdoor sports. Here in Oklahoma, spring also means storm and tornado season. Typically, May has the most and more dangerous storms. As I type this, towns throughout the state are reeling from severe storms and two separate major tornadoes within the last two weeks.

While scary and devastating, storms can also be beautiful in their own way. There are many novice storm chasers who follow severe weather simply for the chance to get a stunning picture. And for those not afraid of storms, even children can be enthralled. So this week’s craft idea is:

Making a Storm

Materials

For this creation, you will need:

A full sheet of blue paper

Scrap paper in a different shade of blue (optional)

Cotton balls

Glue

Tape (optional)

Yellow pipe cleaners

Markers or crayons (optional)

Step 1

Glue the cotton balls across the top of the paper. We did it along the longer side, but you can have a taller sky if you’d prefer. Do two or three rows, enough to tell that it’s a cloud. You can either place them in neat rows, like one of my kiddos did, or randomly.

Step 2

Cut the pipe cleaners to fit your paper. Since our project was in landscape layout, I cut the pipe cleaners in half. If doing portrait, you might be able to not cut them at all. We used two pipe cleaners for each picture. Bend the pipe cleaners in a zigzag pattern. I found that one-inch intervals with sharp bends worked best.

Step 3

Glue or tape the pipe cleaners to the picture. Make sure one end it touching or just under the bottom of the cloud. We usually have a difficult time getting the pipe cleaners to stay in place when we use glue, so we switched to clear tape. It added a bit of shine, but once the picture was finished, it didn’t look as out-of-place as I expected.

Step 4

This step is where you have a choice. You can either draw raindrops all over the page, or you can draw them on a darker blue paper, cut them out, and glue them to the picture. For creativity because she recently learned how to do it, one of the kids drew raindrops with a marker but colored it in with crayon. The youngest, who has decided he loves gluing things together, made his raindrops out of dark blue paper.

Options

As mentioned in the beginning, some storms come with hail, strong winds, and tornadoes. We kept our project simple with rain and lightning, but your child can easily add the other elements. For hail, color in or glue white circles mixed with the raindrops. Wind could be shown by horizontal lines or have your raindrops go sideways. A tornado could be a spiral drawn coming out of the cloud or a piece of yarn glued in a swirling pattern.

And that’s it! You will have the beauty of a spring storm without the hazards. Share your creations in the comments below!