Craftulate has a great series, The Ultimate Guide to 50 Craft Materials, 50 days of crafts and activities featuring different materials. I’m honoured to be able to participate but was quite honestly wondering what I was thinking choosing cups as my material. I asked myself, “why couldn’t I have chosen foam sheets or googly eyes or pipe cleaners?” but once I started to give it some thought, I realized that not only was it easy to come up with new ideas, there are several crafts and activities that we’ve done in the past that have used cups.
Cups are actually a very versatile craft material and something that many people already have on hand. Here are just some of the many cup crafts and activities that are possible. There is also a link-up below for you to add your own cup crafts.
We made plastic cup butterflies earlier this week. We taped red heart shaped doilies to the back, poked pipe cleaners through the top for the antennae and used eye stickers and a Sharpie marker for the face. You could also use googly eyes.
The kids made Monsters using green cups, googly eyes, eye stickers, Sharpie markers, and pipe cleaners. It’s always neat to see how different each of the finished products turn out.
When we created a backyard Olympics, one of the crafts we made was the Olympic rings with cups and paint.
At Snuggle Puppy’s pirate themed birthday party last year, the kids all made hooks using cups and tin foil. This is simple but so fun!
For our Rainbow Theme unit, I made layered jello in cups.
We also used plastic cups in three of the games at our Minute to Win It Family Fun Night. They were easy games but so fun!
Meaningful Mama has a really great activity for teaching beginning reading using plastic cups.
This fire cup knock down game from Lalymom was for their Fire Prevention Week.
Craftulate has a unique idea to create ornaments with plastic cups.
Meaningful Mama has used a science experiment using cups to teach the character trait of flexibility.
These make your own constellations from KC Edventures are such a great way to make learning fun!
Craftulate used cups to help in teaching colour sorting.
Be sure to check out all the craft material posts to get ideas on how to use other common craft materials. If you are looking for creative ideas for kids, you may also be interested in following my Kids Activities Board on Pinterest.