Tabletop Easel Tutorial by Teach Preschool

 

It is a pleasure to join UCreate with Kids today. My name is Deborah J. Stewart and I am visiting here from Teach Preschool! I have a masters degree in early childhood education and have been working in this wonderful field for over 20 years.

 

 

I started Teach Preschool as a way to promote excellence in the field of early childhood education in both the classroom environment and the home environment. Early learning is such an exciting time in a child's life and there are so many wonderful ways to promote learning. If you have a young child or teach young children then I invite you to hop on over to my blog and discover the wonderful ways you can facilitate preschool learning! For today, I am sharing this fun little idea on how to make a table top easel - take a look...

 

{DIY: Tabletop Easel Tutorial}

 

I have been hanging on to a stack of left-over boxes trying to decide what I could do with them. I am terrible about throwing something like this away so I decided to try making my own tabletop easels...

I had already cut the boxes into pieces and so I started with the boxes all flattened out with the extra flaps cut away leaving me with a set of long, rectangular, cardboard strips.

I took the cardboard strips outside and painted them with fast drying high gloss spray paint. Painting the strips isn't something that has to be done but I had a bunch of paint left over from a previous project and thought it would be fun to add some color...

 

Once my pieces were dry, I folded each cardboard strip into three parts and then taped the ends together with a strip of colorful duct tape...

So this is what I had completed so far...

 

To finish off the tabletop easels, I added a clothespin to the top of each easel for holding the paper...

The clothespins were attached to the easels with Velcro...

Now that my easels were all completed, I put paper on each one and set them out ready for the children to give them a try. The children can try a variety of tools like crayons...

And watercolor paints...

The easels don't just have to stay on a table. We will try them on the floor and outside too!

The one tip I can already share with you is to be sure to select fairly heavy boxes for the easels so that they will hold up under a bit of pressure. I think mine just might need a little reinforcement but we will see how it goes!

Written by Deborah J Stewart of Teach Preschool!