Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Sam Kelly. I'm an artist and educator, and today I'm going to show you a traffic light art project for preschoolers. You will need a paper plate. You'll need some black paint. I've used Tempera paint, a paintbrush. You will also need a glue stick, some string, a hole puncher, a pencil, red, yellow and green construction paper, black construction paper and scissors. Sounds like a lot but it's going to be very simple. So the first step is to make some circles on your construction paper. As you can see I have already done that and this is an activity that you can have your children do. It's very useful to them to trace shapes and templates. You can just trace a paper cup or whatever you have lying around in the classroom or at home and this will be, whoop, wrong side, this will be building a skill for them if they can also cut it out with scissors, that would be great. And the other thing I've done in advance is to paint my paper plate and I just painted the whole thing black. It's something again that's skill building for the kids, fun, might take you only a couple of minutes to do but it will take them a little bit of time to get the hang of holding onto that paintbrush and exploring the paint so it's really a good activity for them. And then of course, using glue or paste is yet another thing to have them experiment with. So get these all done in order and let's go ahead and punch a hole at the top here. This is where we can hang them as a traffic light might be hanging over the road. We've got some black string here. I'll just tie that. If any of them know how to tie a knot that would be another activity that they can do. At this age it's all about getting those little hands working. Sometimes children can get frustrated, especially when they are like around five, six years old, they start to realize that they could do something and then their hand just won't do it so I like to remind my students that we are not born knowing how to use scissors or paintbrushes or glue, we have to practice just like we practice writing and math and reading. All of these things take practice but it helps if you are practicing in a fun way while learning about traffic laws and looking both ways before you cross the street. So gluing these on on nice half paper plates and we now have a traffic light that the children can hang up in their room or in the classroom. I'm Sam Kelly. Thanks for joining me.