Learning the alphabet is much more exciting to preschoolers when you explore each letter using a great visual aid. “A” is for Ant is a natural starter. Ants are creepy, fascinating creatures that will capture the interest of any 3 or 4 year old. Couple your exploration with a real live ant farm, and you have a real winner.

This year I used an egg carton craft where the children were able to make their own ant.

Caution, paint does not dry nearly as fast as you may want it to. Start this craft first thing in the morning, to be completed in the afternoon. You may even want to schedule “part 2” for the following day. My class meets just once a week, so we had to get it done the same day.

Egg Carton Ant Craft

What you will need:

Cardboard egg cartons

Washable paint (black, brown, gray or red)

Paint brushes

Pipe cleaners

Googly Eyes

Glue sticks

Cut egg cartons into 3 humps: head, thorax, abdomen.

Cut out the triangular edge on the side in between each egg holder-shell to better define the body parts.

Make holes for the legs. To assure that the holes are opposite each other,

use a cooking skewer to poke the holes directly through to the other side. *NOTE: I got a little smarter the second time we did this craft. Use a single HOLE PUNCH instead of a skewer. It works great!

Paint the egg carton an “ant” color. In this case, we used black.

Let it dry.

Thread a long pipe cleaner through each egg carton shell and

bend the ends to look like legs.

Using a glue stick, attach the googly eyes, and you’re done!