DLTK's Crafts for Kids
Bookworm Paper Craft

This craft is a good way to encourage and reinforce beginner readers.  You can make it competitive by giving each child their own worm and seeing whose will get the longest or cooperative by having all children add their circles to the same worm (it's great fun to see if you can wrap it all the way around the room so that it "eats" its tail!).

Materials:

• a printer,
• paper,
• scissors,
• glue,
• something to color with
• a pen or marker.

Instructions:

• Print out the template of choice.
• Color craft pieces if you printed the black and white version of the template.
• Cut out the pieces.
• Hang the worm's head on the wall somewhere the child(ren) will see it fairly often.
• Each time a child reads a new book (either on their own or with adult assistance, depending on the age of the child), fill out the name of the book on one of the circles and attach it to the worm.
• You can also add the date and name of the child to the circle, if desired.
• If you are "mass producing" these for a daycare or other group project, you can print the templates on different coloured pieces of construction paper.  Then mix and match the pieces to get multi coloured worms.
• This template only includes four book circles (which is a pretty good number for a beginner reader to start with).  You can add your own circles to make a longer worm.

Templates:

• 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 in most browsers).

Template     colour   or   B&W