This is a great project to use when you are first introducing a child to scissors.  It requires single "snips" only. Children can spend a long time filling in the entire shape or can decide to make a quicker project by just pasting in a few pieces -- whatever inspires them!

You can make this appropriate for older children (kindergarten and up) by asking them to fill their templates with a particular type of shape (squares, rectangles, triangles, polygons, etc).

You can read a bit about hot air ballooning on our blog. We went and had a wonderful time (despite my fear of heights, hehe), though with small children I would just stay on the ground with a little picnic and watch the balloons blow up and float away!

Materials:

• children's scissors,
• construction paper -- you can prechoose the colors or provide a variety and let the kids pick their own
• glue,
• paper and printer

Instructions:

• ADULT:  Print the hot air balloon template or make your own.
• ADULT:  Cut the construction paper into long, one inch wide strips (you can cut fast, they don't have to be perfect)

ex: 
 

• Show the children how to hold their scissors.
• Let the children snip off pieces from the strips of construction paper...  As the children get older, you can ask them to try to snip perfect squares, but to begin with, just let them happily snip away however they like

• Either squeeze the glue onto the template for the child or squeeze some into a margarine container lid and give the child a q-tip or popsicle stick to spread the glue themselves.
• Let the child decorate their hot air balloon with the snipped pieces -- don't worry if they go over the lines.
• Let dry.
• ADULT:  cut out the shape along the dark line (you should be able to turn the page over and see the dark black line through the back of the paper)

Templates:

• Close the template window after 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).

Template       (B&W)

Print friendly version of these instructions