Arts & Crafts for Children to Learn About Italy

Teach children about Italy's place in history, and its people's culture with fun and educational craft projects. Cultural crafts like tile mosaics and tissue-paper stained glass windows can help kids learn about Italy's Renaissance and great artists, while fun food and flag crafts teach them what Italy is famed for in modern times.

Pasta and Pizza

Have an Italian food day at your house to teach children about Italy's pride and joy: good food. Before cooking pasta or pizza, help kids dye macaroni noodles red and green with food coloring and rubbing alcohol. (This pasta won't be for eating when it's done.) They can glue the noodles onto construction paper to make an Italian flag or a pizza.

Mosaics and Windows

You can make a real tile, stone or glass mosaic outdoors, with gardening tiles or stones, black or white pebbles, or colored glass squares. Set them in plaster, or (for older children) in cement. Indoors, you can make paper mosaics with different-colored squares of paper and glue. For Italian cathedral windows made from tissue paper, use black felt or craft foam for the tracery that has been cut out with an Exacto knife by an adult, and let kids glue on thin, colorful tissue paper in between the black "metal" frame to create their own stained-glass-look art project.

Gondola Craft

When learning about Venice, make paper gondolas from construction paper and glitter. Children can cut out the well-known "beak" shape of a gondola in several layers to make it look three-dimensional. Decorate with gold tissue paper and glitter, and make a notched gondola stand of sturdy cardboard to stand up your paper boat for display.

References

• Hands-On Crafts for Kids
• Disney Family Fun Gondola craft
• History For Kids mosaic project

Resources

• DLTK.com Colored Macaroni
• Pizza Game Project
• Tissue Paper Stained Glass Windows