DLTK's Crafts for Kids
Macaroni Sunshine Craft

This is a good project to use for children who are practicing their scissor skills. The sunshine is a large shape with zig zag cuts -- a good practice shape for cutting.

It's easy to make your own colored rice, colored macaroni or other pasta shapes (instructions are included) and you can store it indefinitely once you've made it. I find the dried pasta less messy for the kids to use than rice is.

Alternatively you can use dried cereal like fruit loops or cheerios.

Materials:

• scissors,
• glue,
• printer,
• paper (we used construction paper which we cut a bit smaller and put through the printer but you can also find colored printer paper to use if you like),
• one of:
  • colored macaroni (or other shapes of dried pasta
    or
  • colored rice
• Optional:  something to color with, sparkle glue or glitter. We used a brown marker to draw a crosshatch, basket pattern on the bottom.
• Optional:  popsicle stick

Instructions:

• Print out the sunburst template or draw your own basic sunshine outline on a piece of paper.
• Remind the children how to hold their scissors.
• Cut out the sun template - cutting it out is optional, but I think it makes for good scissor skills practice for the kids. You know best how much patience your child has at craft time... if they're a 2 minute crafter *grin*, skip the cutting and just let them glue on the macaroni!
• Either squeeze the glue onto the template for the child or squeeze some into a margarine container lid and give the child a q-tip or popsicle stick to spread the glue themselves. I prefer to let them use a q-tip and spread it themselves.
• Decorate the sunburst shape with colored macaroni or colored rice.
• Hang on the fridge!

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 or FILE, PRINTER SETUP in most browsers).

Template       (B&W)