Children can practice their fine motor skills by ripping and rolling the tissue paper into balls, then use their creativity and imagination to design their own beach ball!
In this activity, use craft supplies you can find around the house to create your very own ball on a paper plate! This is a fun activity for school-age children to practice their rolling and gluing skills, while creating a fun craft that reminds you of summer and playing outside!
Supplies:
A paper plate
Liquid glue (this helps the tissue paper stick the best!)
Tissue paper, as many colours as you like
A foam shape (optional)
Popsicle sticks
Scissors
A marker or pen
Before you begin, make sure to grab all of the supplies you need and have a space that can get messy, sometimes liquid glue can be messy!
Step 1: Have your paper plate laid out flat on your workspace. Start by choosing the popsicle sticks that you want for your ball! You can choose different coloured ones, or colour them yourself using markers or paint if you want! I needed 6 popsicle sticks to make my ball, but you may need more or less depending on the size of your plate!
Step 2: Now you can make the different sections for your ball by placing your popsicle sticks on the plate. You don’t need your glue yet, you’re just placing to see how they fit on the plate! To make 6 different sections of the ball like you see in mine, start by placing two popsicle sticks across the center of your plate hotdog style (or horizontally) across. Then, place another two popsicle sticks diagonally going from left to right of the plate. Repeat this with your other two popsicle sticks diagonally from right to left. You should have 6 equal sections of your ball! Don’t worry if your popsicle sticks overlap!
Step 3: If your popsicle sticks overlap, or go on top of each other, then you will need to cut them. I had to do this for my ball! With your popsicle sticks still on the paper plate in the spots that you want them to be, use a marker or pen to draw a line where they start overlapping or touching another popsicle stick. Once you have marked all of your popsicle sticks, you can remove them from the plate and cut along the line you just made. Popsicle sticks can be tricky to cut, so make sure you ask an adult for help!
Step 4: Once all of your popsicle sticks are cut, place them back on your plate to make sure you are happy with how they look! If they don’t go all the way to the center of the plate that is fine, mine didn’t! I will use a foam shape later on to cover up the blank space in the middle of the plate, and you can too!
Step 5: Next, you can cover the whole side of a popsicle stick with liquid glue and place it back onto the paper plate. Repeat this step for each of your popsicle sticks. You can now place your paper plate on the side to dry, it should take about 10 minutes!
Step 6: Now comes the fun part! You get to rip tissue paper to fill in the different sections of your ball. You can choose as many colours as you want! I chose 6 different colours to have one colour for each section, but you could also use many colours in each section, it’s your choice! Rip up the tissue paper into shapes about the size of a toonie. But don’t worry, if they are smaller or bigger, it doesn’t matter, because you will be rolling them up later! They also don’t have to be a certain shape, so just have fun ripping the tissue paper!
Step 7: Once you have finished ripping all of your tissue paper, roll each piece up into a ball and place them somewhere they won’t roll off, they’re pretty small so they can get lost easily!
Step 8: Before you start gluing your tissue paper balls onto your paper plate, you can place one ball in each section so you remember what colour you want to use to fill your ball. If you’re doing a multicolour ball, then you can skip this step!
Step 9: To start filling each section of your ball, use liquid glue and put it all over the section you are gluing. Only do one section at a time because the liquid glue dries quickly, and you need to fill up each section with your tissue paper! Repeat this step until you have filled all the sections of your ball!
Step 10: The last step is to glue a foam shape in the center of the ball, if you want to! I chose a circle and a star to be the center, but you can choose any shape you want! You could also draw a shape in the center if you don’t have a foam shape, or use other craft materials to make the center of the ball, like beads, pom poms, or a pipe cleaner! Use your imagination and creativity!
Before you do anything with the ball, let it dry! I let mine dry for 30 minutes to make sure that the tissue paper was stuck on! Your ball is finished! It can be a cool decoration to remind you of summer or something fun to give to a friend or family member! Use it however you want!
~ Made By: Katie P.