Patriotic Craft with Coffee Filter Prints

The boys and I have been into July 4th activities recently. Today’s patriotic craft came about because we had a huge pile of coffee filters! With that in mind, I knew I wanted to incorporate some ideas from Housing a Forest’s Monster Marker Prints.

decorate for the 4th with this patriotic craft

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What we used
Coffee filters
Red and blue Crayola markers
White construction paper
Foam glitter star stickers

Little Hurricane seriously loved this simple craft! I honestly think he would have used every single coffee filter if I’d let him. Engineer and Snoopy were busy playing together, so they didn’t get into it until later. They’ve already requested we do it again tomorrow, though!

I placed a piece of white paper under each coffee filter, then the kiddos got started. We used blue and red washable markers to color all over coffee filters. Some ended up fully colored, while others just had a few lines on them. I had fun creating random patterns, while Little Hurricane enjoyed bopping the markers on the filters.

When we were happy with are marking, we spritzed water all over the coffee filters. I used mini spray bottles from those travel-sized packs of bottles. Little Hurricane had to use the palm of his hand, but Engineer and Snoopy had no problem using the spray bottles.

Right after that, we placed construction paper over the colorful wet filter and pressed down. We lifted the construction paper off the coffee filter and marveled at the pretty patterns we’d made! We ended up with two construction paper prints for each coffee filter we decorated. Needless to say, we had a lot of cool red, white, and blue marker prints by the end of the day!

After the filters and prints were dry, we decided to cut them into hearts. Kind of a “we love America!” addition to this patriotic craft. Little Hurricane and I set about doing just that. Then we saw the foam glitter stars . . . since everything’s better with a little glitter, we just had to add them!