Color Your Own Paper Kites

It’s very, very windy here, which means it’s just the time of year to break out the kites! I wanted to make kites my 18 month old could participate in, and he’s not really up to hot gluing, or even knotting yarn for the tail. What he’s really good at, though, is coloring. 

Thus we have color your own paper kites. It’s a super easy project that even the youngest kids can participate in. You only need a few materials, and these babies fly like they were born to it. Which, of course, they were. 

There are two designs, a dinosaur and a butterfly, available as a printable below. Other than the printable, all you’ll need is two paper straws, hot glue, some yarn/twine, a glue stick, and crayons or colored pencils (or markers. We’re very inclusive here). 

Making Your Paper Kites

Start by printing off and coloring in the printables. Just click on the pictures below to go to the printable PDF version of each. 

The next step is to color them any way you’d like. You could also decorate using glitter or glue or stickers or whatever. You don’t want anything that will be really heavy, or that will stick up and cause problems when it’s time to fly. Other than that, they sky’s the limit (Pun intended!). 

Once you’ve colored and decorated your kites, fold the paper along the dotted line, then use a glue stick to stick the two halves together. 

Now cut along the edges of the kite. You should have a double-thickness kite-shaped piece of paper when you’re done, like the butterfly kite up in the corner of the above picture.

Here comes the parent supervision part. Heat up your hot glue gun, because you’re going to glue the frame of the kite now. Take one of your paper straws and tie your twine or yarn to it about 1/3 of the way from the top, then glue it to the back of the kite long ways.

Now take your second straw and cut it into thirds. I used a ruler to mark the cuts so I could make sure they were even. A standard paper straw will split into two 2.5″ sections, and one slightly larger section.

Take your two smaller sections and glue one to each side of the straw you already glued down. These make the cross pieces of your kite.

You can use the final section of straw to hold the end of your string length. Just put a dot of hot glue on the straw and press the end of the string in, then wind the slack up and you have a nice little string holder.

Your last step is to make a tail. Cut a 1′ piece of string and glue it to the bottom point of your kite. Tie pieces of yarn or ribbon around it to make a fun and colorful tail!

And that’s it! Now take your kite out, run around, and watch it fly!

Did you give this project a try? How did it go? Leave a comment and let us know!