A suncatcher craft is always popular with children and so effective for display in classroom windows or at home. This one uses our tiger colouring pages - but of course you can adapt the craft for any animal colouring pages your child fancies.
After completing our multi-coloured tigers (which we all love), my youngest suggested that we make a few tiger suncatchers. I think he just really liked the end result from the bleeding tissue paper and did not want to leave the tiger theme alone just yet. To start with, we stuck with the Chinese New Year tiger colouring page image and traced over it using a black sharpie onto a laminated sleeve. For this craft I tear our laminating sleeves into two pieces and just use one sheet.
Tracing over the Chinese New Year tiger colouring page
The traced tiger image
The traced tiger actually looked really impressive! If we were just tracing tigers I would have loved it but we like using puffy paint when we make some of our sunctachers and the tiger image was a bit too detailed for the thick puffy paint to work. So I went back to the website and found a simpler tiger image – we used this tiger colouring page.
We then started tracing over this image. On some sheets we just traced with our black sharpie, but with others we used our black puffy paint. I love the effect that the black puffy paint gives but you do have to be careful as it does smudge and you must give it time to dry. I accidently moved one of the black puffy paint tracings before it was dried and ruined the whole thing. So just to be on the safe side I often leave the traced images to dry overnight.
Going over the simpler tiger colouring page with puffy paint
The next stage is to colour in the images with your sharpies. Other felt tip pens may also work but we have found the sharpie colours work really well on laminated sleeves.
We coloured in a mixture of images. Some were the more realistic orange of a typical tiger but others were more abstract and colourful and just plain fun. We are definetly going through a bit of an abstract colour theme in our crafts at the moment! I think it is down to the grey winter weather and us craving colour, but whatever the reason, colourful tigers seem to be popular with both my kids and myself at the moment.
Once you have finished colouring in your images you can choose if you want to cut them out or not. We tend to cut ours out but I wanted to show you the effect of just leaving them as they are on the laminating sleeve.
Suncatcher tigers without cutting out
Or you can slip in some cutting practice and get the kids to cut out their suncatchers.
Chinese New Year tiger suncatcher cut out and ready to put up
Completed suncatchers - realistic and colourful!
Either way I must admit I enjoy the whole process of creating suncatchers. Not only is it fun, but you end up with something cheerful on your windows and the kids get to trace (which is great for them), then colour and possibly cut out the image. So all in all a great activity for younger hands.
Showing the suncatcher process
Here are a few of our finished tigers.
Tiger suncatchers on display on the window
This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 10 and 12. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on the different learning activities that they do including lots of hand-on maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
