DLTK's Holiday Crafts for Kids
Paper Strip Popcorn Craft

This is a simple and incredibly fun craft! You can use all sorts of materials—cotton balls, tissue paper, or even popcorn—to add a flare of creativity to this cute popcorn craft. Creating an adorable cut and paste popcorn bowl will let children practice their scissor skills and their patterning. The only thing that makes this craft even better? Popcorn!! *giggle*

TIP: I highly recomend having some popcorn beside you while you create this craft. Whether you use it for the craft, as a tasty treat, or a bit of both!

Materials:

• a printer,
• paper (red, white, yellow, blue),
• scissors,
• glue,
• Optional:  tissue paper, cotton balls, or popcorn

Instructions:

• Print out the popcorn template.
• Print out the paper strips template or (optional) instead of using the template you cut out your own strips of paper from scrapbooking paper or construction paper (red and white).  I like to just use construction paper or scrapbook paper -- it's quicker, easier and looks great but some children really like using scissors to cut along lines which the template provides.
• Set aside the popcorn bowl template for now -- we won't be using it quite yet.
• Cut paper strips about 1/2 an inch wide and 8 inches long from the paper strip template, from construction paper or from scrapbooking paper.
• Talk to the children about making patterns; a classic popcorn bowl has a red, white, red, white pattern but let your children get as creative as they please!  Ask them what kind of pattern they would like to make and have them lay out a few strips of their pattern on the table.  Some children will enjoy spending quite a bit of time playing with their patterns before they begin gluing pieces on.
• Glue the pattern onto a yellow piece of paper or directly onto the template page (cut out the label first if you plan to glue directly onto the template page).
• Squeeze glue all over the paper if you tend to work quite fast or just put it on a section of the paper if you need a little more time.  You can squeeze it straight from the bottle or use a plastic cup with glue inside and a popsicle stick for applying it.
• Lay your paper strips on the paper, recreating your pattern.  You can put them on the paper horizontally, vertically or diagonally.
• Let dry.
• Once your glue is dry, flip the paper over so you can trace the popcorn bowl shape. Now carefully cut out your popcorn bowl shape -- this is the best time for an adult to lend a hand.
• Glue the finished popcorn bowl onto a blue piece of paper.
  
  OPTIONAL: If you want, you can glue a little piece of yellow paper on top of the popcorn bowl to give a background colour to the popcorn shapes.
• Now the fun part! Glue the popcorn shapes onto the space above the popcorn bowl. You can choose to use different materials.
  • To use cotton balls, split them into three or four pieces and roll each piece into a little popcorn shaped ball. Glue the little pieces of cotton "popcorn" on the space above the popcorn bowl.
  • To use tissue paper, tear the pieces of tissue paper into 3 inch by 3 inch squares, approximately. You can use a few colours like yellow and white. Roll and scrunch up the tissue paper to create popcon shapes and glue them on the space above the popcorn bowl.
  • To use popcorn, pop a bowl of fresh popcorn (I suggest air popping the popcorn so that there is not any oil or butter to stain the craft). Glue the popcorn onto the space above the popcorn bowl. It is a good idea to put the yellow background in this space if you are using popcorn because it may shrink slightly as the glue dries.
• Write something on the label ("popcorn", your name, a fun word, "movie night", etc.) and glue the label onto the front of the popcorn bowl.

Craft Templates:

• Close template window when done 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).

 Popcorn Template       (B&W)

 Paper Strip Template    (color)

Printable version of these instructions