Easy Mother's Day Straw Flowers Craft

Here's an extremely simple craft idea to make little flowers from paper and drinking straws. Make a whole bouquet and give them to Mom. This is a perfect preschool Mother's Day craft. Go to the great site Preschool Daze for more pictures and great ideas.


Preschol Daze

Drinking Straw Maze Toy Craft

This is a fabulous idea to make your very own drinking straw maze toy craft. Use straws to create a maze in a box lid and roll a marble through the maze. You can make small or big mazes. Hours of fun.

Materials:

• box lid
• drinking straws
• construction paper(optional)
• scissors
• pencil
• glue
• marble

Directions:

1. Draw a simple maze design in pencil on the inside of your box lid. If desired, you can cut and paste a piece of construction paper into your lid beforehand to give your maze a color background, but this step is optional.
2. Cut straws to match each line in your maze.
3. Pipe glue on the lines and put on the straws. Allow to dry.
4. Use a marble and roll through the maze.

Source: Strong Start

Drinking Straw Star Ornament Craft

These are such cute ornaments. What a great idea. These drinking straw ornament crafts are great for the 4th of July. They look like fireworks, or equally good to hang on the Christmas tree. Simple and easy to make.

Materials:

• 2 inch Styrofoam balls
• 20 drinking straws
• scissors
• white glue
• tray or scrap cardboard
• small metal hook
• ribbon

Directions:

1. Cut straws in to 1.5 inch long pieces.
2. Pour glue onto a scrap tray or other surface.
3. Dips straws into the glue and push into the Styrofoam ball about 1/8 inch deep. Space evenly about 1/2 inches apart. Trim straws as necessary.
4. Tie ribbon in a loop and tie to the top of the metal hook.
5. Dip the end of the hook into glue and stick firmly into the ball. Allow to dry.
6. Hang up your fireworks for the 4th of July or hang as stars on the Christmas tree.

Source: Favecrafts

Drinking Straw Collage Crafts

I thought this is a great idea to make a drinking straw collage truck craft. This one is a drinking straw truck, but it's just an example of what's possible. You could make a log cabin, castle, train, robot, the sky's the limit.

Materials:

• lots of drinking straws
• scissors
• glue
• 2 pieces of construction paper
• crayons
• 2 plastic bottle caps

Directions:

1. Draw a very simple truck on construction paper. Use big, simple shapes like squares and rectangles. Keep it simple. Don't forget the tires.
2. Now the fun part, cut straws and start to cover the truck with the pieces. adjust the lengths as you need. You could put ones sticking up for smoke stacks or make an exhaust pipe.
3. After you've cut all the straws, them cover the truck generously with white glue. Put on all the straws as you id at first. Put on bottle caps for the wheels. Allow to dry.
4. Cut out around your truck. You might need some help from an adult with an exacto knife.
5. Draw ground on another piece of construction paper with crayons. You could use black for a night sky, blue for day or any other color.
6. Glue your truck to the background.
7. Draw details on the paper like headlight beams, smoke, birds, etc.

Source: No Time for Flash Cards

Drinking Straw Bicycle Craft

Wow, what a creative idea! This is not really a craft for small children, but I just wanted to show you what's possible with some drinking straws and a little imagination. Follow the link below, there are lots of cool arts created from straws. Here in Japan, there is a little stop motion animation short program, "Puchi Puchi Anime that has short cartoons and all the characters and backgrounds are made from straws. There are little creatures, shrimp, trees and a dragon. Great food for thought.

Source: Environment Team