Shamrocks seem to be the thing to craft for St. Partricks day activities and I got this idea from another shape someone used on Pinterest.

It can be done with any shape and I figured why not do this with a Shamrock.

I consider this type of crafts to be from the template based, do it yourself crafts. If you’ve been on this site at all then you know how much I stay away from copycat crafts and this may speak to some of you as a copycat crafts project.

But, its’ really not. If you give a child a template (meaning the shape of a particular object) and let them do their thing on it then it is really a process only art activity, since they are not that aware of what they are working in. Granted they don’t get to do THAT much in this project but, if you really want to do something specifically for the holiday then this works.

For this project I had to do a lot of the work before  It’s really pretty since you can hang them on your windows. You can do it in any shape for any holiday.

First I drew it the Shamrock, making double lines so I could cut out the inside and the outside.

Then I cut out the inside and if you wanted you could do it like that but, I wanted the whole thing to be the shamrock shape.

After I cut out the outside as well I laid it on top of a piece of clear contact paper leaving the sticky side up, and gave the the children a few shades of green tissue paper. If the children are younger like toddler age. then I would just cut out the pieces for them into squares or other shapes to let them just put them all over the contact paper. If they are a bit older then they can cut out the pieces themselves.

After the shamrock is filled the way they want it filled, you take another piece of clear contact paper and with the child whose shamrock it was  help them cover over the whole thing. Don’t worry if doesn’t stick so smoothly, the window effect will still be nice.

I then cut around the edges of the shamrock to finish it off.

I put it on a maroon towel so you can see how pretty it looks. We then punched a hole in the top and hung it by the window as you can see at the top.

Project #2: Green collages

The second project I have here is plain and simple a GREEN collage. I just the took the Holidays colors, which is green in this case…and  gave the children  an assortment of materials that are  green

and had them make collages with the  material

There you have it a 5 yr olds collage and a 4 yr olds collage.

There is a way to do non copycat crafts for ANY situation.