This Wacky Weaving project is a lot of fun. This lesson gets kids cutting, tearing, and gluing like crazy. Such a good way for kiddos to practice those fine motor skills. And, it is super open-ended, so kids can be creative and get outside the usual weaving box!

Weaving is hard for kids. They just don’t get to practice the over/under skill enough. Let’s be real, there’s so much to cover sometimes in elementary art that covering it effectively can be difficult. Also, sometimes weaving can be boring. So, trying to jazz it up as much as possible is sometimes worth the trouble.

So, here's what to do:

First, cut strips of white tagboard longways. Tagboard is a thicker paper. Cardstock would also work well.

The strips don’t have to be straight. These strips can be as wacky as desired. Take a look at the vertical white parts in the next photo.

Next, use scrap paper to add color and texture to those wacky strips. Tear or cut and add pretty much any pattern (or non-pattern) desired. This step takes a lot of gluing. If students have trouble using liquid glue bottles, take some advice from this post called Glue Surgery. Add color with crayons. Take a look in the photo above to see how one student used crayons. You can see the spirals and crosshatchings. 

Make a Warp

A warp in weaving terms is the vertical and stationary part of this project. (Sometimes, lay people call this the loom. It’s a little confusing. Here’s a helpful post that explains the terminology.) Warp is used for this part of the post because of the vertical aspect of the cutting.

Cut a 12x18 black piece of paper to make a warp for the weaving. Here's a super helpful video that shows how to do this. (When another educator does such a wonderful job with a video demo, why make one of your own? Thanks FlapJack for this tutorial!)

Glue the wacky white strips to the black paper. One strip for each section (or strip) that was cut. Essentially, you will cover the vertical strips of the black paper with the wacky white strips. Trim as necessary to make them fit (such a good test of visual discrimination). You can see the strips glued to the black very easily in the next photo.

Paint Additional Strips

Paint a 9x12 sheet of white tagboard with either cool or warm colored tempera. Textured sponge rollers were used here, but paint can be applied in any manner for this step. Once the paper dries, cut it into strips . Choose a solid color of construction paper to cut into strips as well. Then, weave the painted strips and the construction paper alternately. Look closely to see the painted paper strips in the photo below. Look for the green and blue paint. The solid yellow is the construction paper.

Troubleshooting

One reason this is such a successful project is that even when kids miss with the pattern of over/under, their work still looks visually appealing. So, students could be corrected with the over/under pattern or they could just leave it as their best try. Most of the images in this post left the work as is. However, students did come back to the work at a later time to take a second look. They were easily able to identify where they’d missed the pattern once they’d had some time without working on it.

These really brighten the hallway!