Recently we did an American Flag made of tissue paper – this would be perfect for Veteran’s Day or Flag Day or Memorial Day or 4th of July.  I found a  printable online and used that as my pattern.  Googling “American flag printable” and then looking at the images has lots of possibilities.

I gave the kids two choices – they could either do the whole flag in tissue paper or they could color everything but the stars.  To do the whole flag took a good half hour.

You’ll need to cut lots and lots of 1×1 squares of red, white, and blue tissue paper.

We did the stars first so I put a dab of glue on each star (use liquid glue, not a glue stick).

Then put the squares around an unused pencil eraser and scrunch it.

Stick it on a star and repeat 49 more times.

For the blue background, we just put a row of blue around the edge of the stars.  If you’re really ambitious, you could put a blue in between each star.

Finally, do the stripes (remember the first one is red).

 

 

I’m teaching art once a week at a local Christian school so I thought I would share my crafts.  Since we’re in Florida and sea turtles nest on the beaches here, I thought paper plate turtles would be a good craft.  It can be as easy or hard as you want.  All you need are two paper plates (I used heavy duty just because they had a little more dome shape to them), green or brown construction paper, crayons/markers, and a stapler (glue might work).

This was my pattern.  The big piece is the head and front flippers, the smaller one is for the back flippers (so cut two).  You will also need a tail, but we just ripped a corner off the construction paper and used that.

One the back of one of the paper plates, draw three hexagons in the middle.  The draw a line from each of the points to the edge of the plate (these are called scutes).  If you’re feeling fancy, add little rectangles around the edge.

Color your turtle and then staple it together.  You could use googly eyes if you wanted, but we just drew eyes.