To tell you the truth when you think of egg cartons what do you think of?

Besides cooking and baking that is?  Caterpillars, right? Those typical, copycat, caterpillar crafts so many adults make with kids.

Well! the egg cartons I am talking about there by the way are the type seen below, the Styrofoam ones that have a cover

So I was working on this series to see what kind of art we can give kids with the materiel’s found around the house.

In my experience, when I was teaching years ago, whenever I would ask parents to save materials to use for art or crafts projects, I would get egg cartons. Galore.

So I figured I had to come up with some uses for egg cartons.

Well one really good use for them is to cut ‘em up and use them for glue or even paint. Each child can get their own group of egg holder pieces with glue or paint if you run out of other canisters or containers to use .

So as I was looking at these egg cartons and thinking what art CAN I do with them, my first reactions was “Oh of course”   Cut em up.

So that’s what we did, and I decided to try combining the egg carton pieces with a mosaic idea.

I cut the egg cartons into small pieces and did run into a small problem. You can ONLY cut pieces from the flat part of the carton as otherwise they do not stick.

So I gave the children cut up pieces of egg cartons and added other small cut up pieces of blue foam(because only the yellow egg carton pieces may be monotonous) and told them to create a picture mosaic using these small pieces.

So these are some of the results I got from a just turned 5  year old. she just collaged with them.

…  and  from an 8 year old who was trying to make a vase in mosaic form, but got frustrated….

….and from a 7 year old who used the pieces to create a person.

So I learned a few things.

1. Mosaics are very hard to do with children that don’t have enormous patience as it is very tedious work.
2. Egg boxes aren’t that great for mosaics anyway
3. It may not be worth it to use the egg boxes to cut up if you can find other materials to use.

What you can try using egg boxes for is cutting up the individual egg holders and giving the children, pipe cleaners and pom poms and markers and other stuff you can think of and letting them make flowers out of them.

Otherwise the verdict is…egg cartons are not the greatest for art projects, but good for glue and paint and even sorting and classifying games.