Preschool Egg Carton Pumpkin Crafts
Pull out the orange paint! With Thanksgiving coming up and Halloween in two weeks, this craft can do double duty!
Description
We did two crafts: 1 that involved a tiny bit of prep (egg carton pumpkins), and 1 that happened just because the paint was out, anyways (fist-print pumpkins)!
Materials:
-Egg carton
-Scissors
-White glue
-Green pipe cleaner, cut into ~3" strips (one per pumpkin)
-orange paint
-black marker (if you want to make it into a jack-o-lantern)
(I find it works best to make the shells (Step 1-7) the night before we paint the pumpkins so that the glue is totally dry when the kids are handling them)
Directions:
1. Cut the bottom of the egg carton into individual cups. You'll need to have 2 per pumpkin that you want to make.
2. Trim the top off of the cup, ensuring that the cup is level all the way around. Cut a 2nd to match the height. (If you leave it taller, you'll have a taller pumpkin. Shorter, you'll have a smaller pumpkin. It'll work, as long as you have 2 that are the same height to match together.)
3. Pierce a hole in one of the cups from each set.
4. Bend the bottom of a pipe cleaner several times (or make a small knot, if you can), and then push it up through the hole that you made in the cup, from inside the cup out. (The bends or knots will ensure that your stem isn't pulled out of the pumpkin.)
5. Put white glue all the way around the cut on one of the cups, and then place the other cup cut-side-down on top, matching up the edges as much as possible. It won't be perfect, but that's ok!
6. Let it dry for an hour or so, and then apply a touch of glue all the way around the cut, smoothing it with your finger. Let dry completely.
7. Loosely place some masking tape or painter's tape around the base of the stem to protect it from the paint. Make sure you'll be able to take / cut it off later.
8. Hand it over to your preschooler for painting! Don't forget - if you don't have orange paint, just mix together some red & yellow!
9. Let dry. Remove tape from stem, & curl pipe cleaner around a pencil tip.
10. Older kids can decorate the pumpkin like a jack-o-lantern with a black marker. My 2.5 year old son loves his pumpkin just the way that it is!
Guest post by Jennifer vanOosten of You Pinspire Me.
