Fun Printable Popsicle Stick Activities

These popsicle stick activities are ideal for keeping your kids busy and will reinforce skills such as color matching, shape identification, patterning and more. 

Sometimes you just run out of things for your kids to do.

In my house, we’ve been reading books, doing lots of coloring and playing with our favorite dot markers.

Even with all our activities, if I don’t plan ahead, we run out of activities to do.

While I wholeheartedly believe allowing your kids to be bored is good for them, I still like to have a schedule of things we can do together.

Last Monday, I found myself with no new activities planned for my kids.

Since it was our one scheduled day to be at home, I knew I’d better come up with something to occupy their minds at least for part of the time.

As I rummaged through our supplies, I came across our colored popsicle sticks and remembered I’d been wanting to create an activity for them.

Popsicle Stick Activities For Kids

This activity is great for kids of varying ages.

I created these printables to be the actual size of popsicle sticks so little children could simply match the popsicle sticks to the card, without having to recreate the images and patterns on their own.

To challenge your older children, you can print these cards at 50% instead of 100% so they have to build the shapes or complete the patterns without the card as a guide.

To try out these popsicle stick printables for free, simply enter your email in the form at the end of the post to have two sample pages sent to your email inbox, free of charge.

Materials

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• popsicle stick printables
• colored popsicle sticks
• paper
• laminator (optional but will greatly increase durability)
• laminating pouches  (optional but will greatly increase durability)

Skills Reinforced Through Popsicle Stick Activities

I love a great, simple activity that kids enjoy doing but also reinforce necessary skills. This activity definitely fits the bill. 

It helps with:

• hand eye coordination
• identifying colors
• identifying shapes
• learning basic geometric principles
• spatial awareness
• logical reasoning
• categorization

Adapting This Activity For Kids Of Varying Ages

This simple activity had my kids occupied for quite a while.

My toddler had to take things slow to get the popsicle stick exactly where it needed to be when building shapes and recreating patterns.

Taping the paper to the table helped all the sticks stay easier so he didn’t accidentally bump them all off and get frustrated. 

He wasn’t able to identify what popsicle stick came next in the pattern, so I said the pattern out loud to him and then told him which colored stick was next. 

While he was building the shapes, I also told him what they were called. I had him point to the shape after I said its name.

My older son (he’s 6)  did all of the pages but had the most fun building the abstract shapes. He thought he built all of them correctly, but some sticks weren’t in the right order.

I showed him how you can tell which stick is on top of another one by looking at how much of the popsicle stick is showing. If some of the popsicle stick is missing, then it isn’t on the top layer.

All in all, I was a little surprised how much fun they had with colored popsicle sticks and a few pieces of paper.

This activity is great for last minute fun or for helping kids develop a stronger math mindset.

More Fun Printables For Kids

• Free Disney Color By Number Printables
• Community Helper Worksheets
• Pretend Play Doctor Printables