- The classic childhood tale, “The Three Little Pigs,” is a read-aloud favorite. To enhance the story, parents and teachers can turn it into the basis for a variety of art activities. Kids won’t get tired of using a three-little-pigs theme, if the activities are varied and involve different types of art media.
- Starting with blue place mat-sized poster board rectangles, children can create a collage featuring the little pigs’ houses. After cutting out three construction paper square houses with a square bodies and triangle roofs, kids glue them onto the poster board, leaving a three-inch margin at the bottom. For the house of straw, kids can glue shredded yellow paper all over one house; for the stick house, they can use strips of brown construction paper and for the brick house, little rectangles of red paper. When the three houses are done, wisps of cotton glued onto the sky can serve as fluffy clouds, or children may prefer to make a construction paper sun and draw a rainbow. Adding green “Easter grass” onto the margin at the bottom of the poster board provides the pigs with some grass.
- A pig mask project starts with the teacher helping children cut eye holes in a paper plate. Kids then glue on paper cups for snouts and glue the top of the cup onto the paper plate. The next step is to paint the paper plate and snout pink. Once the mask has dried, kids can staple pink construction paper triangles on for ears, folding the tips down. With a red marker, kids can draw on a mouth, and they can make eyebrows and eyelashes with a black marker. The last step is to punch holes in the sides of the paper plates and attach elastic string for tying the masks on.
- Using drawings of the wolf in various “Three Little Pigs” books or a coloring page--such as one from the "National Geographic Kids Online Coloring Book"--for models, each child draws, colors or paints, then cuts out a large paper wolf. Their art can then be displayed in a line around the classroom wall. Make sure each child has his name written on his page or wolf cut-out, so that parents can admire their child's work when visiting the school.
- Before beginning this edible art project suggested by Vicki Blackwell on her online teaching pages, kids need to wash their hands. Piggy cookies start by frosting a round sugar cookie pink, centering a marshmallow for a snout, and using a little frosting to add tiny chocolate candies to the snout and slightly larger ones for the eyes. They can fashion ears out of pulled-off pieces of marshmallow. To make the pigs’ houses, kids can use canned icing or peanut butter to “frost” graham cracker square houses and roofs. They can use crushed shredded wheat for a straw house topping, thin pretzel sticks for the stick house topping or red fruit roll-up squares for the brick house.