Craft is an essential element of Playgroup. It helps to develop the children’s small motor skills and dexterity, with actions such as cutting, gluing, folding, colouring and painting. It also assists with colour names and recognition and is vital to their imagination.

We aim to have a different craft theme each week, as long as there are enough parent volunteers supervise.

Here are some examples of what we have made:

The clown is a perennial favourite, made using a white paper plate with coloured pompons for hair and nose, googly eyes, chenille stick eyebrows and mouth cut out of red construction paper. Lends itself to be stuck onto a large lollipop stick so that the children can carry it around. The balloons are good for colour name recognition and colouring in a defined area. The strings help with the use of scissors and gluing in the correct place.

“The Sea” can be decorated as much as desired with self-stick foam fish-shaped stickers, and blue shiny petals glued on for the sea.

The yellow duck is the child’s footprint using washable finger plate and a ready-made bright coloured bow.

A very “fishy” work of art. These spotty fish are extremely simple for even the youngest children. They are white paper plates with a piece cut out to provide both the mouth and the tail. Decorate using “Do a Dot” markers or paper self-stick dots.

The cute frogs make “Hoppy Father’s Day” cards. The flower picture is achieved using commercial flower shaped foam stickers, green lollipop sticks and a length of green construction paper cut into a spiky shape to represent grass. The turtle, often made and always popular, takes various shades, textures and patterns of green paper, in small squares, stuck onto half a white paper plate.