Craft Spotlight: Nature Stencils

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Use detailed Nature Stencils to draw beautiful pictures while developing fine motor skills and encouraging image association. Each shape has a coordinating border to add interest to students’ drawings.

The stencils kit features many different types of flora and fauna that can be used to discuss animal and plant ecology. Click on the link to view the product at our website!

Another great feature about the stencils is the size: large enough for little fingers to trace all the fine details without frustration. A good way to practice tracing is to use the specialized image border. By tracing along a straight plane, students will develop their own techniques for tracing and can apply those techniques to the more complicated images on the interior of the stencil.

The best part is that one stencil becomes a two-in-one. Pop out the interior of the stencil to duplicate the image that students can trace. As a result, while one student traces the interior of the stencil, or practices with the intricate border, an advanced student can grip the inner shape and trace without the need for extra support.

Use the traced outline as a guide for developing scissor skills! Cut out the resulting shape to make decorations for classroom walls. Check out our project video below!

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BIG IDEA: Sewing Stencils Quilt!

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Explore different fine motor techniques such as sewing and tracing with this BIG classroom project! Combine everyone’s artwork into one. Trace recognizable basic shapes using our Fine Motor Skills Stencils and learn a basic sewing method safely with our Plastic Lacing Needles. Check out more about the tutorial below!

Age: 4+

Duration: 20-30 minutes

You’ll Need:

R5601 Plastic Lacing Needles

R58620 Fine Motor Skills Silly Stencils

• Felt

• Yarn

• Marker

• Scissors

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The best part about our Plastic Lacing Needles is that they are rounded at the tip, which means that they are safe and easy to use with a variety of soft fabrics.

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You don’t need much material for this project. The goal of this activity is to encourage students to develop their fine motor skills while creating artwork that’s a part of a larger art piece: a classroom quilt!

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Provide your students with a variety of felt colors. Guide them to think about the scenes or shapes they want to trace onto their felt piece. In the photo above, I’ve decided to make a stormy scene using our raindrop, thunderbolt and bean-shaped stencils to make the clouds! Younger students can trace basic shapes in the stencils kit, such as squares and circles, if they wish.

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You will need to use markers to trace out the shapes. Using pencil will catch onto the felt threads and won’t create an imprint. If you would like students to practice their tracing before transferring their skills onto the felt piece, provide them with scrap paper to trace onto.

The Fine Motor Skills Silly Stencils are designed to help graduate your students from tracing basic shapes and objects to more complex designs. Yellow colored stencils in this set represent easier shapes to trace, such as triangles, squares and circles. Red stencils represent medium difficulty while the blue stencils feature the most complicated designs. You will see that in the following images, I’ve used mostly red and blue stencils. These are best to use when making “scenes” out of the images.

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Once you have traced out the images, get your Lacing Needle and yarn ready! You will use the traced images as guides for sewing.

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Widen the eye of the Lacing Needle to thread the yarn through.

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Make a rough estimate of how much yarn you will need for each traced part. Tie a knot at the very end of the length of yarn. Show your students how this will prevent the yarn from slipping through the felt when making a stitch.

Here’s an image of a basic stitch that I’m using in this project:

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This kind of stitch is called a running stitch. This means that you slide the needle and thread over and under the fabric in one continuous direction.

There are a variety of other stitches you can use to sew up the traced shapes! You can get older students to experiment with these types of stitches.

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BACKSTITCH: The backstitch is made by sliding the needle and thread over and under but instead of continuing the stitch forward, the needle and thread are pulled back into the previous hole before continuing forward. This stitch helps to secure the two pieces of fabric in place, or to repair a bad stitch.

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OVERCAST STITCH: You can use the above stitch to combine students’ felt projects together into one quilt-like wall mural. The overcast stitch is a series of stitched loops. Instead of passing the needle and thread straight to the next hole, the needle and thread are looped around the edge of the fabric and brought through the next hole on the underside of the fabric.

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Tip: The felt may be a bit stiff in some places, so you’ll need to maneuver the Lacing Needle through. The best technique to do is twist the point of the needle a little bit to the left then to the right to loosen the felt threads.

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Once your students’ stitched pieces are complete, attach them together into a large-scale quilt or tapestry mural! You can either tape the pieces together with scotch tape or sew them with thread. 

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Willard City Elementary Artists use our Tessellations Animal Templates!

The Artman posted his students’ math/art projects that used our Animal Template Tessellations! Tessellations are a great way to build coordination and patterning skills! See more about Artman’s process below.

Artman posted many photos of his students using our Animal Template Tessellations. A variety of designs from the pack were used. These included the elephant, lizard, fish, butterfly, dog, turtle and spider. The pack includes so much more, however! See the full display of designs at the full web guide HERE.

This project was posted by Artman at his WordPress blog Artmanews on April 30, 2012, entitled “Tessellations -part 1.” Visit the full post on his students’ tessellation art the link!

After the tessellations were traced onto paper, the students incorporated a lesson in color theory to complete their project. They chose complementary colors, which are two colors on the color wheel that are directly opposite each other. This student chose blue and orange as his complementary colors.

Instead of merely coloring in the tessellation in one flat color, the interior details were filled in with the complementary color to help distinguish the patterns from each other.

Lovely work!

Thanks to the Artmanews for this post!

Images and original post © Artmanews

This post was not sponsored for a review. At LittleFingersBigArt, our mission is to present to our readers and viewers the newest and most creative craft ideas that fans of Roylco have made on their own. Our goal is to allow you and other educators and parents to reuse our products in fun ways so that children always get the best educational experience from them!

We’d love to see more ideas like this one! If you’ve got a brilliant craft idea or have made a version of one of our crafts that you would like to share with us, send an email to subscriber@roylco.ca with photos, descriptions or a link to your work. We will create a feature post and link back to you with full credit. We’d love to hear from you!

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