Preschool Picasso: Yarn

I was excited to do this yarn-themed program because I've seen so many good yarn craft ideas for kids online. I based my crafts on the books I've read and we ended up reading two books, one at the beginning of the program and one after our crafts, because we had a smaller group than usual.

For my first book, we read "Little Owl's Orange Scarf" by Tatyana Feeney. This is one of my go-to books for owls and is about an owl who doesn't like his orange scarf his mommy made him. At the end of the book, Little Owl gets a new scarf that he likes much better.

The other book I ended up reading was "Edmund Unravels" by Andrew Kolb. This story was truly a picture book about yarn. Edmund is a ball of yarn who is looking for adventure, but realizes he misses the familiar.

Our first craft of the program was doing some process art using paint and yarn. The group each had their own cups of paint and yarn dipped inside. Once they stirred up the yarn to get it covered in paint, they put that on their cardstock. They could drag the yarn, dab the yarn, try to make designs with the yarn, but the goal was to try a new way of painting that was creative and unique to each child. These turned out fun!

Our next craft was making an owl just like in our first story, but with yarn weaving. Each preschooler was given a card stock owl body that had small slits cut all around it so that they could weave their yarn around the owl body easily and make patterns any way they like. I kept my craft simple by just weaving the yarn back and forth across, but a few of the kids made awesome checkered patterns.

Other Books:

Extra Yarn Mac Barnett

A Bedtime Yarn Nicola Winstanley

A Friendship Yarn Olga Demidova

The Red Wolf Margaret Shannon