Contributed by Leanne Guenther

This is a simple cut and paste paper craft good "just for fun", alphabet practice, spelling practice, a reptiles theme, or an animals theme.  If you like, you can mix and match the colors to make different patterns.  There are different types of snakes you can make:  Lower Case Alphabet,  Upper Case Alphabet,  Spelling Words,  Vowels (aeiou).

The pieces for this craft are fairly large (there are three pieces on each page -- making the entire alphabet take 9 pages).  This looks terrific on something like a school bulletin board, but can be a bit large for small individual projects.

If you would like to do a smaller alphabet snake, make your own small oval template from a piece of cardboard or margarine container lid.  Allow the children to trace this onto pieces of construction paper and allow them to print the letter on the piece.  Add wiggly eyes and a red construction paper tongue!
 

Materials:

• something to color with if using the B&W version,
• scissors,
• glue,
• paper.
   
• You can use brass tacks ("brads") instead of glue to attach the pieces if you want it to be moveable. Keep in mind though that you'll need a lot of brass tacks to do the entire thing and that they can be hard for young fingers to manipulate...  You might want to just do the head and rattler and use glue for the rest.
   

Instructions:

• Print out the templates of choice:
   
  • If you're doing the entire alphabet, you just print one of every sheet (you can print different colors out if you want to pattern as well).
     
  • If you're letting the children make up words, print two or three copies of each page (and maybe a few extras of the pages with the more popular letters like r, s, t, a, e, i, o, u).  You can print all different colors out to let the children make patterns and unique snakes
     
  • When doing words, you can spell anything you like (names, weekdays, etc) but I particularly like doing "snake themed" words (snake, slither, reptile, tongue, rattle, etc) after learning about snakes then putting them up on the bulletin board to make your own snake themed word wall.
     
• Color (where appropriate) and cut out the template pieces.
   
• You can make one long straight snake or a wiggly snake -- whichever you prefer!
   

Templates:

• Close the template window after printing to return to this screen.
   
• Set page margins to zero if you have trouble fitting the template on one page (FILE, PAGE SETUP or FILE, PRINTER SETUP in most browsers).
   

Lower Case Letters

Upper Case Letters