This is a great project to use when you are first introducing a child to scissors.  It requires single "snips" only.

My 11 year old made this one.  She ripped the paper instead of using scissors and used multiple colours to give the picture a more 'feathery' look.  She figured she didn't need scissors practice and wanted to exercise her creativity *chuckles*.

You can make this appropriate for older children (kindergarten and up) by asking them to fill their templates with a particular type of shape (squares, rectangles, triangles, polygons, etc).

Materials:

• children's scissors,
• construction paper -- you can prechoose the color or let the kids pick their own
• glue,
• paper and printer

Instructions:

• ADULT:  print template of choice or make your own.
• ADULT:  Cut the construction paper into long, one inch wide strips (you can cut fast, they don't have to be perfect)

ex: 
 

• show the child how to hold their scissors.
• let the child snip off pieces from the strips of construction paper...  As the children get older, you can ask them to try to snip perfect squares, but to begin with, just let them snip away

• 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.
• Let the child fill the template with the snipped pieces -- don't worry that they go over the lines.
• Let dry.
• ADULT:  cut out the shape along the dark line (you should be able to turn the page over and see the dark black line through the back of the paper).
• Glue onto a background.  We used black because owls are awake at night.  We thought about adding some white stars in the sky, but it was close to naptime so we "quit while we were ahead".  You could also add a tree branch and leaves from construction paper -- use your imagination and your judgement about when your child has had enough craft time.

Template:

• 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).

Owl Template