Craft Stick Puzzles – A Rainy Day Kids Activity

We had quite a lot of rainy days this summer holidays. Most of the time we still got out and about, but we had a few indoor days where I found some activities to entertain the kids! I spotted THIS VERSION on Pinterest, and we adapted it to our styles!

Craft Stick Puzzles:

I wasn’t sure whether to call these popsicle stick puzzles, or lolly stick puzzles, or craft stick puzzles. What do you call them?!

We started with a roll of pencils, some craft sticks, paper, and a pen:

You will also need a glue stick, a craft guillotine / scissors, a ruler, a pencil.

Step 1: Choose how many craft sicks you want to use by laying them side by side – we used 14:

Step 2: Measure a piece of paper to fit the front of the sticks:

Step 3: Draw a picture onto the paper. I gave my kids a piece each and didn’t give much instruction – I just said it would look good if the colour went up to the edges of the paper:

Step 4: Little Miss (age 7) drew a space picture, and Cheeky Boy (age 4) drew a lot of scribbles which he says is a spaceship:

Step 5: Cut the paper up into pieces that will fit onto your craft sticks. I measured them with a ruler and pencil, then cut them with a craft guillotine. Another way to do it is to stick the whole piece of paper across the sticks, then use a craft knife to cut between the sticks – I couldn’t find a sharp craft knife so I went for this method instead:

Step 6: Glue on the back of each piece of paper then adhere it to a craft stick. Cheeky Boy needed some help to make sure he put enough glue on the paper:

Little Miss was able to do hers by herself:

Step 7: Once the pieces are all stuck on you can put the sticks back in order. This took a while to work out with Cheeky Boy’s as it was a complicated scribble:

So we added numbers to his sticks to make it easier to find the right order again – it helps him with number recognition / counting as well. I wrote the numbers along the tops of the sticks, and he had a go at writing them at the bottom:

Then the puzzles were finished! They had great fun trying them out, and have showed them to their friends since too. I’d love to try this again in a couple of years to see how their drawing styles have changed:

I might make one for myself too!

Do you or your kids like puzzles? I love them and Little Miss likes them as long as they aren’t too hard. Cheeky Boy is normally not interested in them – he’d rather build stuff with bricks!

Bye for now,

Jennifer x

P.S. I’m linking this up to the Tuesday Pintorials linky party!