This art project is great to do with toddler and preschoolers. We are calling it artwork instead of just a craft because each pinecone creation is unique and very expressive, making it into a piece of art. It’s fun collecting pinecones prior to making these beautiful art pieces and spending time in nature, bringing a little piece of the adventure home. Make sure the pine cones are dry and therefore open, to allow for spaces to place the various crafting materials onto.
This craft is great for colour sorting, matching and colour identification. It can easily be made into a counting and colour game. We had fun counting each pom pom as it was being placed onto the pinecone. After creating the popsicle stick craft, we turned it into a game of finding the colours, by naming a colour and having our two year old grab it off of the pinecone.
This Pinecone Art is visually explained in the images below. The images are self explanatory, so we won’t go into too much depth about how to create each. It’s the perfect skill level for toddlers and preschoolers because they can work independently but still feel like they are being challenged by the physical hand-eye coordination, finger pinching hand grasping, as well as the educational identification of numbers and colours. You can place letters and numbers onto the popsicle sticks to create a further educational component.
Pinecone and Modelling Clay Art:
- create multiple coloured clay balls to place on the pinecone scales.
Pinecone and coloured popsicle sticks:
- place the popsicle sticks into the empty spaces and sit them onto the scales of the pinecones. If you don’t want the popsicle sticks to fall when you move the pinecone, place some modelling clay in the spaces prior to adding the popsicle sticks. Roll very thin pieces of clay into long “snakes” and place it around the inside spaces of the pinecones then place each popsicle into the pinecone one at a time.
Pinecones and POM POMS:
- place each coloured Pom Pom into the spaces between the pinecone scale.
This craft kept our toddler busy for an hour, as she moved from one pinecone to the other. Each was equally fascinating to create. Creating three different ones together worked well, and transitioned into each other nicely. She knew exactly what to do and had fun filling in all of the spaces between the pinecone scales.
We hope your toddler or preschooler enjoy making this fun pinecone art. If you have older kids, you can check out the pinecone owl craft on our blog and have them create that while your littlest one creates this.