Hanging Watercolor Jellyfish Craft for Preschoolers

Inside: This jellyfish craft includes using watercolors to create a colorful hanging decoration. Such a fun activity that is perfect for the ocean theme!

One of our last themes for our school year is the ocean. Most of our preschoolers have visited the beach, so this theme is very meaningful to them. This year we added the most beautiful watercolor jellyfish craft to our art table.

BUT, if you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you know I am not really keen on crafts. I really want as much process art as possible. So, I found a way to do that with this.

There’s lots of squirting glue.

There’s pressing as many tissue paper squares onto that glue as possible.

There’s squirting watercolors onto coffee filters for the tentacles.

Okay, that last one? That was truly the biggest hit to this art activity. Give any child a spray bottle and you will see delight. Huge delight.

Hanging Jellyfish Craft for Preschoolers

What we used:

Plastic lids or bowls (we happened to have some from a previous project)

Tissue paper squares

White glue

Coffee filters

Liquid watercolors (we used blue and green)

Setting it up:

Cut the coffee filters into strips. We only used the parts with the folds.

We chose blue and white tissue paper squares and placed them on the art table along with glue and the plastic lids. We turned the lids upside down so they were more like a bowl.

Squirt or brush glue on the inside of the plastic lid.

Then press the tissue paper squares on top of the glue.

It’s okay if your children don’t cover all of the plastic lid. In fact, none of ours did.

Let dry.

Spraying the Tentacles:

Now for the fun part. Trust me. Have you ever handed a preschooler a spray bottle? Yep, it’s that much loved.

I placed our paper strips in a container with sides, to contain the spray. Well, most of it. There were some sprays that went beyond the container.  We put blue in one spray bottle and green in another. Remove the strips from the container and set on a tray to dry. We leave ours crumpled up for a nicer effect.

Assembling the jellyfish:

I stapled the tentacles to the plastic lid. I poked a hole in the top to add some clear fishing line and hung them from the ceiling in our classroom.

Fun, right?

More ideas to try:

Come see what our classroom looked like when it was set up for our beach theme:

Planning your ocean theme? We’ve done the work for you!

I am so excited to be a co-author of these ocean theme lesson plans!

24 preschool learning activities for your ocean theme, including literacy, math, science, art, fine motor, and more! A great resource for teachers and homeschoolers.

24 preschool learning activities that cover:

Literacy
Math
Science
Fine Motor
Sensory
Gross Motor
Art
Social Studies
Music
Circle Time
Social/Emotional