Adorable Paper Plate Gingerbread Man
This adorable paper plate gingerbread man craft is the latest in our A-Z paper plate crafts series. Our gingerbread man is perfect as a Christmas craft or as a Letter “G” activity for a preschool unit, and he’s definitely one of the cutest gingerbread crafts I’ve ever seen.
Today’s gingerbread man craft is a great project to kick off the Christmas crafting season with your toddlers and preschoolers. It’s fun, it’s easy, and it’s simply adorable! Kids will get to experience a fun painting technique and decorating the gingerbread’s face is great for fine motor development.
To make our paper plate gingerbread man, we used:
- paper plate
- 2 shades of brown paint
- paint brush
- dish scrubby (for a textured effect)
- googly eyes
- craft foam shapes
- black buttons
- white yarn
- scissors
- white school glue (and lots of it, as you’ll see!)
The hooligans began by painting their paper plates. I set out two shades of brown paint – a light brown (very gingerbread-ish), and a darker brown.
Your child can blend the two colours together as she paints her plate, or she can do what we did with one of our plates, and “pounce” a bit of the 2nd colour on with a dish scrubby. This will add texture and interest to your project. The hooligans love “pouncing”, so I always keep a package of these dish scrubbies in the craft room for random painting projects.
We used a hair dryer to speed up the drying of our paint, and then we decorated our plates to make them look like gingerbread faces.
About the glue…
I usually set out a pot of glue and a paintbrush for the preschoolers to use. I find they have better control over the glue that way, and some of our glue bottles are really hard for the youngest hooligans to squeeze.
Neither was the case today. Hee hee!
The glue we have at the moment practically pours out of the nozzle, but that didn’t bother this little hooligan. She was thrilled that she didn’t have to struggle to squeeze the glue out, and she quite enjoyed the process.
First, she glued her gingerbread’s eyes and mouth in place, and then stuck on the cheeks. We used foam craft circles for the cheeks, but you could use construction paper or card stock.
Then she drizzled glue all around the edge of her plate and placed long lengths of white yarn in that glue.
Isn’t it adorable already?
We were about to place her paper plate by the fire to dry (we needed some serious heat to dry all that glue!) when she decided her gingerbread man needed a nose.
She dug through the bucket of foam pieces, and found a piece that she liked.
Is your heart melting yet?
I totally forgot to take a photo of her dried gingerbread before she took it home, but here’s a shot of the other paper plate gingerbread man we made.
What do you think? Isn’t this one of the cutest gingerbread crafts ever?
For more gingerbread crafts and activities, check out:
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Jackie is a mom, wife, home daycare provider, and the creative spirit behind Happy Hooligans. She specializes in kids’ crafts and activities, easy recipes, and parenting. She began blogging in 2011, and today, Happy Hooligans inspires more than 2 million parents, caregivers and Early Years Professionals all over the globe.
