All parents and kindergarten teachers know how important it is to teach children the rules of the road. And children do not always readily assimilate the information presented to them, striving to cross the road outside the pedestrian crossing zone or at a red traffic light. And since children love to play and create entertaining crafts with their own hands, it is easiest to convey the necessary information to them in a creative playful form. An interesting application will help with this - a traffic light made of paper. After all, in the process of making it, you can not only keep kids busy with an exciting activity, but also teach them how to cross the road correctly, paying attention to the traffic lights.
In addition, appliqué activities help develop children’s creative thinking and fine motor skills. There is an opinion that it even helps to increase intellectual abilities.
For any age of preschool children, you can develop your own models of traffic lights, increasing the level of complexity and intricacy in accordance with the age of the kids. You can make such crafts both at home and in kindergarten, or in elementary school during creative lessons.
How to organize the process
First, you should prepare your work surface. The table should be as free as possible and the space should be bright. Make sure that the task is not too difficult and will be as age-appropriate as possible.
For the work of the little ones, you can immediately make blanks, or you can control the use of objects. You need to be especially careful with small parts and scissors.
For comfort, you can take a plastic cup, which will be convenient to trace on paper.
What might you need?
- Cardboard,
- Paints
- Scissors,
- Cotton sponges,
- PVA glue,
- Tassels,
- Colored paper,
- Scotch.
To make a fake interesting and original, you don’t have to buy expensive materials or specifically run to the stationery department for colored paper.
If it is not there, but there are pencils, markers and paints, you can decorate the product yourself, and the child will be even more involved in the process.
For the little ones
The materials for such a traffic light will be the simplest, depending on what you plan to make the traffic light from. It could be simple paper, yellow, red and green leaves of trees from the park, pieces of colored fabrics. Tools can also be thread and a needle, glue, cardboard, leather, etc.
We will be making paper appliqué for children in junior kindergarten groups, therefore, we will need the following items:
- a piece of cardboard;
- colored paper - green, yellow, red and black;
- glue.
For kids, it’s better to prepare in advance a template for the shape of the traffic light itself and the circles for its lights, so that it won’t be difficult for the children in the process of making the craft and the result will be exactly the option we had in mind.
The technique for performing such a craft is as simple as it sounds. You can simply stick the colored circles in the desired sequence onto the prepared cardboard. You can complicate the task slightly and cover a cardboard rectangle with black paper and attach circles on top of it to make the craft more realistic.
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Soft traffic light
This is the first option, and it is quite convenient and easy to make. To do this, we take a cardboard or a cylindrical blank.
In the first case, the sponges will simply be glued to a flat surface, and in the second, more complex format, the fake will be voluminous.
The essence will remain the same. White sponges glued to the surface are soft and interesting for contact games. Children can use paints to give fluffy cotton wool the color of a traffic light.
To do this, you just need to use paints, markers or felt-tip pens. Next, if the paint leaves a mark on your hands, you can cover it on top with tape. You just need to cut out a circle of the desired size and stick it on top of the dried cotton wool.
Traffic light made from palms
For this fake you will need colored paper. The hand should be outlined with a pencil, and then the child simply cuts it out. Three finished blanks of the desired colors can be fastened with glue, or a stapler or tape.
An alternative could be the interesting idea of placing colored palms on an A4 sheet. Having arranged them in the desired sequence, simply glue them onto the sheet.
From CDs
A traffic light-themed craft can even be made from laser discs; you will need 3 more small plastic caps from bottles or cans. The process is simple:
- The covers are painted in traffic light colors.
- The discs are attached to a base - it can be cardboard or a missing thread.
- Covers are glued to the discs. Ready!
Traffic light teacher
How to remember the rules in a fun and quick way? Of course, take note of the creative fake.
Kindergarten, home, school - it doesn’t matter, you should always learn road safety rules, and to remember this, you can make an original and interesting fake with your children.
The topic and rule can be written on the traffic light circle, or nearby, so that the child can clearly understand what’s what and how to do what.
On red you can write that vehicles are allowed to move, but pedestrians are not, on yellow - drivers should prepare to stop, and pedestrians should walk. And of course, on green, the transport stops, and people walk across the road along the zebra crossing.
To make the process as interesting as possible, you can make a small application in the form of a traffic light in a notebook or on a separate A4 sheet. Then everything is simple, you need to draw or stick on the details and sign what and what color means.
For older preschoolers
For children 6-7, it is better to complicate the task so that the kids themselves cut out shapes for traffic lights from the proposed stencils and draw facial expressions on them. To interest them more, you can offer to draw the faces of emoticons or emojis, which are so popular nowadays, on the craft mugs.
Traffic signals can be decorated with various elements. To highlight a lit signal, the rest can be shaded in the form of a hash mark. Or, conversely, you can emphasize the desired color by gluing or drawing rays around it.
At older preschool age, you can already safely create trimmed appliqués. The applique also has a wonderful combination with origami. Traffic signals will look original in the form of figures created using folded sheets of multi-colored paper.
This combines 2 types of craft making techniques and increases children’s interest. An example of such a product is a traffic light made from cats.
Mosaic
Torn or carved mosaics are not that difficult to make. This process may especially appeal to those children who need to develop fine motor skills. What is the essence of the creation: you need to cut or tear slices (pieces) of leaves of three colors.
On A4 format we make markings for the child in the form of three circles, then take one of the prepared fragments, and the task is to fill as much white space as possible. This is not an easy task for kids, but for older children it is a very exciting task.
The traffic light itself symbolizes prohibition, preparation and movement. Red, yellow, green. Ban, wait, go. To the start, get ready, march! All this is just one of the few examples with which a teacher and a child can play in association.
Unique crafts
Children of primary school and senior preschool age are already able to show their imagination and manual dexterity and create individual, unique crafts. In this case, you can use the following traffic light design techniques:
- quilling or twisting. This type of technique involves rolling up colorful strips of paper, in this case creating an original look for traffic signals. For many, this will seem difficult at first, but with the care and experience of a teacher or educator, any child can handle this technique.
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- trimming. Twisting also takes place here, but the work is more painstaking. Thin strips of colored paper are wound onto a pen shaft and then glued onto the template. You will need as many rolled paper strips as possible so that when gluing there are no gaps between them.
From shells in the SpongeBob theme
If your child has a favorite cartoon character, then he probably knows a hero like SpongeBob. Why, children, even adults know this hero.
This is not the first time SpongeBob has tested his license, and perhaps creating a miniature road for a car, a pedestrian crossing and a traffic light will seem very interesting and original to your child, which he will approach with great enthusiasm.
You can draw shells, you can buy blanks, or, if you have a sea\\river\lake, you can try to find shells of a suitable size and decorate them.
conclusions
As you can see, the large-scale nature of such an idea as creating a simple traffic light can be very interesting and creative if you approach the issue outside the box. So, for example, you can create an entire layout, plan, or the simplest fake from scrap materials.
Everything depends on taste, color, availability of time and materials. Children should not be limited in their imagination, as this is an important element of learning.
What might you need?
- Ready to use table
- Scissors,
- Glue,
- Paints,
- Plasticine,
- Additional materials.
As a rule, DIY traffic light crafts for children become one of their favorites.
There are absolutely no restrictions on your imagination, since a traffic light can be made from almost anything. The main thing is to maintain the correctness of the colors, but even here sometimes you can give free rein to little authors.
