This mosaic paper recycling craft is perfect for Earth Day or just as an easy craft for kids, after all, all of us like activities for kids that are easy to set up and it’s even better when they are free.
Paper mosaics are a great way to create some simple art with your child and they can be a great way to practice scissor skills too.
What You'll Find on This Page
Mosaic Recycling Craft
We end up with a lot of scrap paper here but like a lot of people I don’t like to just chuck something out if I think we can get a second use out of it.
This craft uses old bits of paper and old magazines to create simple activity that’s perfect as an Earth Day craft.
While you can of course draw your own recycling symbol it’s not the easiest of ones to do so for this I’ve used our free recycling symbol template. It’s also helpful if you are doing this craft with a group in a clasroom or a preschool and don’t want to have to draw a shape out 30 times!
Free Recycling Symbol Template
Our recycling symbol template is free to use and I’ve shared lots of ideas with it for other ways that you could use the printable. Make sure you go and grab it!
What Other Materials Can I Use To Make A Mosaic With Kids?
I’ve used scrap paper and old magazine pages cut up to make this craft but there’s lots of other materials that you can use to create a mosaic with kids and a lot of them are things that you might find in your recycling box too!
Obviously make sure that any items you use are clean before you craft with them.
- Popsicle sticks
- Buttons
- Pieces of bubble wrap
- Beads
- Stickers
- Fabric scraps
- Cereal box
- Colored sweet wrappers
- Pieces of wrapping paper
- Plastic lids from bottles
- Scrap construction paper
- Dried food like pasta or lentils
- Old CDs (cut up by an adult)
- Pieces of corrugated cardboard
When is Earth Day?
Earth Day is on April 22nd each year irrespective of the day of the week.
Craft Supplies
- Recycling symbol template (see above)
- Scissors
- Glue
- Scrap paper, old magazines and newspaper etc
How To Decorate Your Recycling Craft
Start by printing our your recycling template. I’ve printed this out onto white printer paper but it would work well on other colors of paper too.
Cut some shapes out of your scrap paper and cover the recycling symbol in glue.
I’ve used PVA (school glue / Elmers glue) for this as that was what I had available at home but you could also use a glue stick which would give you a bit more precision when you are putting your glue onto the shape.
Where possible, you want to keep to the recycling symbol itself so that if you drop any of the paper mosaic pieces they only stick where you want them to.
If you are using some of the other mosaic materials that I’ve mentioned above then you might want to choose white glue instead as this is generally better for sticking down any awkward textures.
Mosaic crafts are great for doing with kids as you can see in this mosaic heart craft that I made with my daughter when she was a preschooler.
As well as being an excuse to practice using scissors (as you can make snips into strips of paper etc) they’re also a good excuse for talking about shapes with your child. We looked at squares, rectangles and triangles. It’s a great activity for fine motor skills too.
When your recycling shape is covered in glue you can start to stick on your paper mosaic pieces.
How neat these are will obviously depend on the age of your child, even young kids can do this craft though as they can always sprinkle cut pieces of paper onto the template and as long as your glue is in vaguely the right place it will still look like a recycling symbol.
You will find that if you want your symbol to be filled in properly then you’ll have to cut some pieces of paper to shape to fit the triangular part, but obviously this isn’t important or necessary.
I loved using pieces of old magazines with this craft as the colors and images it happened to have were so fun.
Just looking at two pages there were loads of different shades of green and there were lots of heart shapes too which seemed perfect for this craft and I think made a cute addition to it.
More Earth Day and Recycling Activities for Kids
If you can tear paper then this paper craft is another fun way to give a new life to old craft materials.This torn paper Earth craft is perfect for using up any scrap paper that you have lying around and uses another of our free templates too to help make it easy for you to set up.
If you like making paper collages then you could also try this paper plate Earth craft that uses paper to make the different continents. You can add a collage heart like we have too if you like.
Finally we have a big pack of printable recycling activity sheets that are all totally free. There’s lots for kids to do including tracing, deciding what should be recycled, composted or re-used and a recycle bin sorting activity.
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