In pre-K at my school, the four- and five-year-old students learn about one letter of the alphabet each week. So, I try to tie in a lot of the projects we make in art to the letter of the week. This preschool popsicle art project is a colorful and fun way to reinforce student learning about letter P while building fine motor skills (and confidence) as they cut, glue, and layer paper!
Materials Prep–Popsicle Sticks and Paper
For their study of the letter P, we made paper Popsicle collages. This involved me pre-cutting quite a few pieces of paper ahead of time, but the students also got some good cutting practice as they used their scissors. Yay for building those fine motor skills!
Ahead of time, I used the glue gun to hot glue three popsicle sticks onto each piece of cardstock. (Regular paper would probably be too thin.) Then, I precut a bunch of popsicle shapes in a variety of colors. If you want to do less cutting, the popsicles could just as easily be shaped like rectangles instead of domed on top. Because this is for TK, I also went ahead and cut some of those popsicle shapes in half and in thirds (so that they could easily layer them), and I cut some strips of paper to the width of the popsicle paper so they could add some details that would already be just as wide as the popsicles.
Let Them Layer!
Then students chose their “base” color for each popsicle and glued them on top of each popsicle stick. I demonstrated how to layer the smaller pieces of paper, and they went to town layering and gluing the pieces I had pre-cut as well as cutting their own pieces and adding them.
This would be a fun project to do at the end of the year, just before summer! I could also see making some similar collages for donuts, ice cream cones, cupcakes, etc. I may change up the background colors next time. What other collage projects have you tried with younger grades?
To see more of the alphabet-themed preschool art projects I’ve tried, check out my O is for Octopus collage or V is for Very Hungry Caterpillar sculpture!