Cardboard Turkey Craft for Preschoolers

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Oh yes it is TURKEY CRAFTS season for kids!!! Move over Halloween, welcome Thanksgiving. Teehee. What isn’t better than a fun and easy Turkey Craft for Preschool? Love this recycled Cardboard Turkey Craft for Preschool. So bright and cheerful. They make a great thanksgiving decoration – or even better – turn them into Turkey Place Cards?

Cardboard Turkey Craft for Preschool - cute collage turkeys with free template. #thanksgiving #turkey #preschool
First shared in Nov 2018

This post is brought to you by the fabulous Raising Kinley! A new regular contributor here on Red Ted Art! Please give her a warm welcome and check out her amazing work!

Hi friends! I’m Cara, the art-loving momma/rainbow addict behind Raising Kinley, a colorful little spot where I share all of our biggest creative wins and most fun learning-through-play ideas. I’m so crazy excited to be here with you on one of my ultimate favorite websites of all time to share our newest favorite holiday craft — cardboard collage turkeys!

We love getting all crafty and creative and covered with paint speckles any time of the year, but holiday time is next level, isn’t it? As soon as the calendar rolls over to October 1st, my daughter, Kinley, and I switch into crafty girl beast mode!

Halloween is all treats and pumpkins and excitement and Christmas is all Santa and presents and craziness, but Thanksgiving is just this nice little calm place to count our blessings, cozy up  and get our turkey craft on. Last year we made these sweet little collage cork turkeys and had a blast, so this year, in the spirit of going big for our first RED TED guest post, we supersized them!

Cardboard Turkey Craft for Preschool - cute collage turkeys with free template. #thanksgiving #turkey #preschool

Cardboard Collage Turkey Supplies:

  • Free printable collage turkey templates — you might want to print on card stock to make them easier to trace
  • Pencil
  • Scissors
  • Cardboard — we used cereal boxes because they the perfect thickness to cut through easily, but you could use poster board or any scrap cardboard you have on hand
  • White glue — we like to put ours in a jar and paint it on with heavy duty kid paint brushes when we are collaging. Just makes life easier!
  • Red yarn
  • Googly eyes
  • Orange or yellow craft foam or felt — construction paper would work, too.
  • Paint, markers, crayons or tempera sticks
  • Collage materials — buttons, feathers, scrapbook paper, ribbon, dot stickers, etc. **TIP — if you are doing this project with little humans, try to limit the variety of materials to four or five different crafty options. They tend to get overwhelmed and frustrated when there are too many choices.
  • Hot glue & hot glue gun

How to make a cardboard turky collage with preschool

Cardboard Turkey Craft for Preschool - cute collage turkeys with free template. #thanksgiving #turkey #preschool

To get started, you’ll want to trace the turkey body and tail feather templates from the free printable on your cardboard and cut them out.

Making the tail feathers:

The first thing you’ll do is color on or paint the cardboard turkey tail feather fan. We used tempera sticks for ours because they dry quickly and they’re nice and vibrant, but if you are doing this project over multiple days and want to use paint or don’t have tempera sticks, crayons or markers would work great, too. You don’t even have to do this step, we just wanted to make sure all of our plain cardboard was covered in bright and pretty.

Next, you are gonna break out that pot of glue and the fun collage materials you’ve gathered up and get to sticking them on. There is no wrong way to collage! Don’t be afraid to go nuts or feel it needs to be perfect, just stick until you think your feather fan looks pretty rad and set aside to dry.

Making the turkey body:

You may want to just leave your turkey body plain brown cardboard, but if you want it to be darker brown, just paint or color it. We used tempera sticks again for this step.

Cardboard Turkey Craft for Preschool - cute collage turkeys with free template. #thanksgiving #turkey #preschool

On to the cute little face! Cut a beak shape out of foam or felt, a snood-sized piece of red yarn, and grab two googly eyes. Arrange them on your turkey head and attach them with white glue.

Assembling your turkey:

Cardboard Turkey Craft for Preschool - cute collage turkeys with free template. #thanksgiving #turkey #preschool

Get that glue gun heated up and attach the cute little cardboard body to the gorgeous collaged cardboard tail feathers and you are all done!

Cardboard Turkey Craft for Preschool - cute collage turkeys with free template. #thanksgiving #turkey #preschool

Wouldn’t these guys make perfect place cards on your Thanksgiving table? I think Kinley and I are going to attach ours to twine and hang them right next to our table to brighten things up a bit. We have this new tradition of making an art gallery of all the holiday art projects we’ve made on the biggest wall in the dining room, kind of like an enormous refrigerator door gallery. All those googly eyes and crafty rainbows really make holiday feasts extra happy and fun!

Cardboard Turkey Craft for Preschool - cute collage turkeys with free template. #thanksgiving #turkey #preschool

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Have fun collaging and eat a slice of pumpkin pie for me — extra whipped cream, please!

More from the lovely raisingkinley.com posts:

More great TURKEY CRAFTS here:

Cardboard Turkey Craft for Preschool - cute collage turkeys with free template. #thanksgiving #turkey #preschool