This is a good craft to use to introduce preschool children to the concept of halves. (it also provides good shapes and colours practice). I love using crafts for easy-going lessons!
You can also use this craft plus the triangle fish for Bible lessons (fisherman's boat).
You can precut the shapes prior to the crafting to speed the process up a bit. If you choose to do this and still want the kids to color the pieces afterwards, just tape the pieces to another piece of paper with a bit of masking tape (leave a couple of the corners uncut). Then when they're done colouring, remove the tape and quickly snip off the uncut corners!
- two pieces of paper,
- something to color with.
- you can also have some 1" squares of blue construction paper or tissue paper (water),
- 2 cotton balls (clouds).
- Print the template of your choice (below).
- Color pieces as appropriate. Use nice primary or bright colours.
- Cut out the pieces along the SOLID lines (adult assistance may be required).
- Set the pieces out in front of the child. Spend a bit of time talking about them (colours, shapes, sizes).
- Ask the child to pick up the circle (don't give
it to them, let them have the chance to pick out the correct shape).
- Point out the dotted line down the center of the circle.
- Ask the child to fold the shape in HALF along that line (you may want to have your own circle so you can do it at the same time... children learn a lot by copying what we do).
- Once that is done, reiterate that they now have HALF a circle.
- Glue the half circle together.
- Do the same thing with both triangles and the rectangle.
- Glue the template pieces to your second piece of
paper to form a boat (see picture above for how the boat is supposed to look).
- Optional: Glue on cotton ball clouds.
- Optional: Glue on squares of construction paper or scrunched up pieces of tissue paper to make the water.
- SOME ALTERNATIVES:
- If the child is at the age where they wish to practice cutting, have them cut along the dotted lines instead of folding. (You'll end up with two boats this way, which is also a neat lesson about halves.... one whole has two halves, two halves make a whole)
- Instead of gluing the boat to the second piece of paper, you can glue the pieces together, put some string through the top and hang from the ceiling.
- Print four black and white templates on four different colours of construction paper. Mix and match the pieces. Then glue the four boats together, attach string and make a mobile (use straws or a paper towel roll to hold your mobile). Or for a bible lesson, make 2 boats and 2 triangle fish.
- Close the template window after printing to return to this screen.
- Set page margins to zero if you have trouble fitting the template on one page (FILE, PAGE SETUP or FILE, PRINTER SETUP in most browsers).