Let’s a pony bead butterfly craft together!

Pony beads have become some of our favorite materials in recent weeks. We recently used them to make our heart suncatchers (no melting needed!) and have been doing lots of threading and un-threading activities. These easy pony bead butterflies came out of all those hours of threading beads and making bracelets.

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This pony bead butterfly craft is so much fun and surprisingly easy for my toddlers and preschoolers. It’s a great fine motor activity for kids of all ages, but especially toddlers!

Supplies:

Pony beads

Pipe Cleaners aka Chenille/Fuzzy sticks (ours were provided free to us from CraftProjectIdeas.com– check out their website for other great ideas!)

That’s all you need!

Pony Bead Butterfly Craft for Kids

We used two pipe cleaners, one for each wing. It’s very simple to make, just let the kids thread the beads onto the pipe cleaners until they are nearly full.

Twist each pipe cleaner into an oval, my toddlers did this themselves with no problem right off the bat because of all the bracelets we’ve made.

Pinch the oval together in the middle. Wrap one pipe cleaner around the center to secure them together. Make sure you are leaving a little bit on the ends, this is what you will wrap together for the body. Do this for both of the pipe cleaner wings. Next twist the two pipe cleaner pieces together until you have one pipe cleaner.

We added one bead (the purple one in the photo below) to the pipe cleaners after wrapping the two ends on each wing together. Next, twist the two remaining pieces of pipe cleaners from each wing together. You could also bead up the center for a matching body but we never ended up with enough pipe cleaner left to do it. My kids wanted bigger wings.

That’s is! Super simple! The pipe cleaners are pliable enough that they can easily be manipulated to the perfect butterfly even if they have to be squished and squeezed by little hands while they are being made.

When we were done we ended up with at least 10 of these pony bead butterflies hanging around the house. The kids had a great time making them!! My daughter is even sleeping with two hanging on her bed.

After the first couple, I was surprised by how easy it was for my toddlers to do with very little help. The only part that seemed to really be a struggle was the pinching and wrapping of the oval. There is a lot of fine motor work going on there for toddlers. My preschoolers did fine.

What do you make with pony beads?

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