Kids Craft: Paper Cup Windsock

To kick off the summer holidays, we did a simple windsock craft project. There are several ideas on the web for this.

Items used: Paper cup, scissors, tissue papers, glue, tape, paints, string, embellishments like pom-poms, googly-eyes, feathers, glitter stickers if handy; else just junk mail/magazines for cutting out pictures, eyes with white paper and black marker and any interesting object for decorating the windsock, while keeping it light and flowing is good.

The picture is self-explanatory, I am sure. We glued easel paper to the paper cups and painted this with tempera paints in solid color to form the creature's 'face'. But, decorative Con-tact™ paper might work well if we don't want to paint and decorate a face.

Taping the long tissue paper strips along the edge is a two person job - a bit tough for little hands to manage on their own as I found out. It is easier if we can lay out a long piece of tape on the table, attach one end of the tissue strips leaving room on the tape to glue it on the paper cup.

The fun part is to create the features for the paper cup creature. We went with a generic monster-like face that is more friendly than scary, to keep it simple. But, it can as well be octopus or jelly fish or carp (koinobori).

We had two sizes of paper cups, rinsed and saved, which we used. But, there are several other options:

• just sturdy cardstock paper rolled into a cone and glued well, with the pointy top cut off a bit, would work as well. With the paper cups, we had to cut out the bottom, of course, for the windsock to work.
• toilet paper inner cardboard tube (or kitchen paper towel inner tube) would be fine - is cylindrical and handy
• thick construction paper or card stock cut into circles or rings or strips and glued together can form a colorful top from which to hang strips of tissue or scrap fabric or even yarn
• to get extra fancy, we can use the toilet paper inner cardboard tube or paper cup as the base and glue on shapes around it - like the classic Japanese carp fish - this is what we want to do next time
• the same koinobori idea can be done with fabric, of course, or even just brown paper bags; paper or paper bag carp should be fun to paint using oil pastel resist technique which we love, and we can eliminate paper cups or cardboard tube for this and simply hang the paper carp... lots of possibilities...