With Father’s Day around the corner, lots of little ones will be helping with preparations to celebrate with their dads. We’ve rounded up some easy Father's Day craft ideas for gifts and cards that can be created at school in the classroom.
Making their own gifts for Father’s Day not only gives children a chance to get creative but allows them to feel proud of an accomplishment, and independence giving their dad a gift they made all by themself. Not to mention these tasks provide fifteen minutes of fun at the end of the day if you need a time-filler, or if you’re covering a lesson!
How to Approach Father’s Day at School
Although Father’s Day is a traditional celebration, not all families follow traditional structures. It’s vital that you use celebrate inclusiveness and diversity on Father’s Day to ensure that children of all backgrounds can participate. Considering these points when you approach Father’s Day in the classroom:
- Explain to the children that Father’s Day is a day for celebrating family. Ask the children to think about the different people in their family or their caregivers and why they are important to them
- Tell children they can make a gift or card for anyone in their family, not just for dads. Help them to think of other relatives like grandparents, uncles, brothers, or other caregivers that are close to them that they might want to give a gift to
- Closely monitor the class for children that struggle with activities and give them support and attention to make sure they feel included. Ask a teaching assistant to help you with this so no student feels left out
- If you feel that celebrating Father’s Day may not be appropriate, consider encouraging the school to celebrate a ‘Parent’s Day’ or ‘Family Day’ instead
Primary School and Preschool Fathers Day Crafts
We’ve rounded up six super-easy tutorials to make Father's Day DIY gifts from kids. Each of these tutorials uses household materials and simple arts and crafts supplies.
Collect up paper toilet rolls or have your students bring in their own (and maybe have a few extra on hand). This tutorial by Non-Toy Gifts teaches children how to make recreate the likeness of an important figure in their life.
Use paints to add skin and hair to the paper roll base and use felts or other strips on fabric to add on a signature outfit. Finishing off each character with googly eyes will get a few laughs and make them look animated.
Paints and glue can be a disaster in the classroom if you don’t have the proper equipment to protect the furniture and children’s clothes. Be prepared with PVC Table Covers and Paint Smocks, school cleaners and parents will thank you for it!
Salt dough is easy and quick to make, non-toxic, cheap, and fun to play with. This Play-Doh like material is also quick-drying, or oven bakeable, meaning any crafts your students create can be immortalised without too much hassle.
This activity by Mommy Moment can be recreated in the classroom if you make some salt dough beforehand. The first step is to hand round flat, oval-shaped pieces of salt dough and get the children to make a handprint in each. You might want to plan ahead by getting children to make their handprint at the end of the day so the salt dough can dry overnight.
Once these are dry the real activity can begin, where children can decorate their handprint in any way they want. Give the children some suggestions such as making a monster or animal out of their handprint, or sticking decorations around the edge. Getting extra creative, you could use modelling tools to create extra patterns or details on the reverse side of each round before they dry out. Use our Wire-Ended Clay Tools to write the names of children in each round so they don’t get mixed up.
Lend a hand to parents getting ready for Father’s Day by helping your students with a Father's Day card preschool activity. This tutorial by blogger Tiff Keetch shows how to create a unique pop-out card that only required three pieces of paper to make. Have children trace their own hand and help them with cutting out the outline.
The tutorial suggests using the caption ‘I love you this much’, but you could think of other options for the children to choose from, or simply let them decorate the card how they want to. We offer a large Mega Mosaics Bumper Value Pack perfect for this task so children can choose different mosaic pieces to stick onto their card.
For other Father’s Day card ideas for kids, take a look at Red Ted Art for simple card activities and downloads.
If Father’s Day has become a bit of an afterthought in amongst all of your lesson planning a simple and quick activity like this one could be just the trick and the end of the day. This printable worksheet is something you can hand around the class to be completed in 10 or fifteen minutes and is suitable for younger children and those learning to write.
You could turn this into an activity where you ask children to contribute their own answers to each question or ask them to talk about their answers in groups. At the end of the activity, you might want to let children take the cards home or you could put them up on a wall of the classroom so that the children can read each other’s answers. Be sure to let them know this beforehand in case they don’t want their answers to be displayed.
This tutorial by Red Ted Art teaches children how to make a medal for the #1 dad, grandpa, uncle, brother, or any other family member, and is more suited to older children in KS2. Collect up jar lids or have children bring their own into school for the activity. You’ll also need some air drying clay.
Alternatively, to make things easier or tailor this activity to younger children, you can use sturdy card as the base for the medal. We stock A4 Coloured Glitter Card in various shades that can be cut out and used to make medals.
Use card, fabric or real ribbon to make the ribbons on each medal and encourage children to be creative and make theirs unique. We stock Metallic Curling Ribbon that can be used to decorate medals and supply sets like the Brights Mixed Media Pack for a huge selection of different materials children can use.
If you’re trying to think up a Father’s Day idea for kids to get on with during a quiet part of the day, or if you have some other activities planned and need to find things to fill gaps in the day, consider downloading some activity worksheets. All Kids Network offers a selection of free worksheets that can be printed out and photocopied.
Activities include drawing a portrait, an acrostic poem, worksheets for answering questions and filling in details, and templates for writing a letter.
No schools need to celebrate Father’s Day, and you might choose not to. If you do or if your students ask you about Father’s Day, it’s good to be prepared to talk to them about its meaning and have a couple of activities up your sleeve just in case.
