A single-hole punch lying in your house can be a great way to keep your kids entertained while also developing their skills; this gives them a chance to control their finger movements and hand-eye coordination as they position and punch into the papers. ⚡️
In this blog post, I explore some of the activities I do with my son using this simple office supply tool that works wonders. 🖇️
Hole Punch Activities for Your Kids
Hole-punch activities are a great way to enable the motor skills of your kids and also give you a chance to create some fun and exciting games for them.
Hole-punch activities can help make their learning process easy and fun by breaking-down mathematical and literary topics into simple visuals.
These activities can also make for easy and thoughtful presents for your loved ones on special occasions.
The best way to get your kids started is to slowly let them practice getting comfortable holding a hole-punch and then punching papers with them.
Hopefully, the following activities will keep your kids engaged while also being a source of fun and information. 😁
Hole Punch Smiley Face Strips
Punching holes in a strip of smiley faces is an activity my son looks forward to. This activity is simple and helps improve his motor skills.
Cut out a strip of smiley faces placed apart, and ask your kids to punch holes in the smiley faces. 🙂
Hole Punch Number Strips
This strip will help develop their basic counting skills and the ability to recall the numbers better.
Write down numbers on a strip of paper and have your child punch holes according to the number you call out. 🔢
Hole Punch Alphabet Strips
This strip will help develop an understanding of the alphabet and the ability to recognize letters easily.
Write down the letters of the alphabet on a strip of paper and have your child punch holes corresponding to the letter you call out.
Hole Punch Cards
This craft is one of my favorite things to do with my son and makes for beautiful greeting cards, which you can gift your loved ones for birthdays and festivals. It is a simple activity to do and keeps your children engaged. 🎂🎈
Give your kids different colored papers and ask them to punch as many holes as they like. Create the desired shapes and patterns from the punched holes.
Pro Tip:
To create an even more elaborate design, you could also print some outline cards for the particular occasion and fill them with the colors of the punched circles.
Hole Punch Cards with Shapes
To create themed cards, you can use shaped hole punches. They include many designs, such as hearts, leaves, butterflies, and flowers.🌸
Give your kids different colored papers like the previous activity but with the addition of shaped punches. Incorporating shapes makes it even more exciting for your kids to punch them.
Hole Punch Confetti
Instead of buying confetti from a shop, you could turn it into a fun activity to involve your kids. These are perfect for birthday parties and special occasions.
Get your kids to punch holes on colored paper and add a few of these circles into balloons and cups, thus creating confetti balloons and poppers at home.
My sister and son had a great time preparing a balloon with pink confetti for the gender reveal party of my daughter.
Hole Punch Mosaic Art
Little dots of punched circles make a mighty picture; this perfectly describes this particular activity. Although it does take some effort, the results are worthwhile.
Draw or print an outline of a design, and you can use newspapers, colored papers, and even scraps to punch holes and then fill that space to create a beautiful picture.
A framed mosaic piece of a garden that my son and I created together adorns our living room wall.
Pro Tip:
The mosaic artwork can also be made on a bigger scale, on printed coloring sheets that indicate a specific color for each space. This activity also helps kids coordinate the colors to the designated areas.
Hole Punch Season Tracker
This activity can help kids learn about the different seasons and the colors associated with each season.
Print or draw a tree with branches, and let your kids punch holes on papers related to the colors of that particular season. Repeat for all seasons of the year. 🍂
Hole Punch Behavioral Chart
You can create a behavioral chart to reward and encourage kids when they exhibit good behavior and help them understand when they go wrong.
You can design a simple chart with a weekly format or use compact wallet-size cards to which you can add punched circles. It helps inculcate a sense of discipline and recognize behavior patterns. 💯
Pro Tip:
You could download the template online and create them according to the areas you prefer to appreciate or discipline your child with.
You can add a reward at the end to motivate them more.
Hole Punch Creature Crafts
This activity can be a perfect way to teach your kids about the different animals and insects with spots.
Cut out shapes of the animals and insects, and get your kids to hole-punch on the body of the animal cut-outs. 🦊
Hole Punch Bookmarks
Cut out the bookmark outlines; you could use paper or felt materials in the sizes and colors of choice. Ask your kids to punch holes in the bookmark outlines randomly. Tie a ribbon to complete it.
This activity helped my son strengthen his motor skills and allowed him to be creative. 🔖
These bookmarks are great to gift teachers for Teacher’s Day.
Hole Punch Leaf Decorations
A biodegradable alternative to using paper, cardboard, and newspapers is to use leaves from around you.
My son and I pick up old or new leaves while strolling in the garden and punch holes in them to create decorations to hang on our mantelpiece at home. ☘️
Hole Punch Flipbook
A simple flipbook can be created by randomly punching holes to create designs that change their movement while you flip through it.
Cut out a small stack of paper in rectangles or squares, and let your kids punch the paper as they wish. Stick them together to make your very own flipbook. 📒
Pro Tip:
To get a more enhanced version of the flipbook, you could use different colored papers, which make it much more visually pleasing.
Hole Punch Shapes
This activity helps your kids to recognize and learn the names of the shapes.
Cut out 2-D outlines of different shapes, and then get your kids to punch holes along the border of these shapes. 🔷
Hole Punch Shape Strips
This activity is an advanced level of shape recognition.
Print or draw different shapes on a strip of paper, and ask your kids to punch a hole to identify the shape you want. 🔺
Hole Punch Letter Worksheets
These letter worksheets will help kids understand and differentiate between uppercase and lowercase letters.
Print the letter in both the uppercase and lowercase formats on individual squares, and let your kids punch holes along the patterns of the letters.
Hole Punch Doughnut Craft
My son and I decorate some paper doughnuts for when we cannot eat too many of the real ones.
Cut out circles with a hole in the middle to resemble a doughnut. Let your kids decorate the doughnuts with punched circles as toppings while allowing them to be creative. 🍩
Pro Tip:
You can print out or draw different food items and have your children decorate them in the same method. You could also turn them into magnets to add to the fridge for a personal touch to the kitchen.
Hole Punched Rainbow Bookmarks
My son learned the colors of the rainbow with this method while also making a bookmark for himself.
Punch holes in papers of the seven colors of the rainbow. Let your kids arrange them by order of the rainbow colors on thin pieces of paper. 🌈
Hole Punched Hearts
When Valentines Day is around the corner, my son and I make these hearts for decorations and gifts for our loved ones.
Cut out hearts in different colors and let the kids punch the holes across the hearts. Then, you can string together all the hearts to form a beautiful decoration. ❤️
Hole Punch Word Strips
This activity is informative and engaging and helps kids learn different and recollect words.
Print out papers with a word and a picture depicting it. Ask the kids to punch holes in the word that you read aloud.
Hole Punch Paper Chains
Another way to use scraps of punched paper is by making them into paper chains.
Gather all the strips of paper you want to use and staple them together to make a bunting-like paper chain. You can then use these paper chains as
decoration for your child’s room.
Hole Punch Party Bunting
Instead of using the usual bunting for birthday parties and other occasions, you could make one at home that doubles into a fun and creative activity for your kids.
Cut out a few triangles or circles of paper in the same size for the length of your message. Individually spell out the words ‘happy birthday’ or whatever message you wish to add on each paper. Let your kids stick punched circles over the letters to create a design. 🎁
Pro Tip:
You don’t need to stick to just triangles and circles and can use templates to create buntings in other shapes – hearts, ovals, semi-circles, and many more.
Hole Punch Weather Tracker
This tracker is an activity to help kids learn the names and characteristics of the many weather conditions they experience around them.
Use a calendar to track the different weather updates every day. Allot different colors for the weather conditions and stick hole-punched circles on the calendar for each day. 🌤️
Hole Punch Lacing Activity
This activity has helped my son improve his hand-eye coordination and strengthen his pincer grip while lacing the ribbons through the holes.
Give the kids a ribbon or thread, and let them lace it through the punched holes of any outline design. You can also reuse old punches strips for this.
Pro Tip:
You can use this lacing technique to make other crafts, such as bookmarks, cards, magnets, and even ornaments that can adorn your Christmas tree.
Hole Punch Counting Strips
The old punched papers can serve as a medium for counting; it is a great way to improve your kid’s counting and recollection skills.
Let the kids count the holes on any given piece of paper. Start with the small numbers and then move on to the big numbers so you won’t overwhelm them. 🔢
Hole Punch Math and Literary Station
A portable box with a few printed sets of paper strips and a hole punch can help tackle your kid’s boredom and keep their mind occupied.
These printed activities are easy to carry and will help you reduce your child’s dependence on gadgets and their overall screen time. 📱
These can be great to use on holidays and for long flights or car journeys.
Hole Punch Writing Practice
To make writing the letters of the alphabet more fun, my son uses punched circles to trace the letter.
Placing the circles along the letters helps kids learn and understand how each letter has to be written in the alphabet. 🔡🔠
Hole Punch Bracelets
A fun activity to do with kids is to make fun jewelry.
Staple together strips of paper you already punched to make simple bracelets. You can make a few to match with your kids. 🔗
Hole Punch Worm Holes
This activity is simple and creative and aims to kindle the imagination and creativity of the child.
Print out an apple with a worm sticking its head from the top of the fruit. Now, let the kids imagine the shape of the worm inside the apple and punch along the lines. You could do this with other fruits of your choice. 🍎🐛
Hole Punch Colouring Stencil
Another way of filling up coloring books with a design is to use the holes on the punched papers as a stencil.
My son enjoys this activity and uses the holes in already punched papers as a stencil to complete pictures with circles rather than just the usual method of coloring. 🖍️
Hole Punch Pattern Formation
Learning to form and identify patterns can be daunting for kids at the onset, but activities with punched circles can make it easier.
You can use different colored circles and let the kids form patterns that they like with the punched circles. This exercise enables them to create and identify patterns effectively.
Hole Punch Colour Mixing
My son learned the basics of color mixing with the help of hole punch circles. This activity shows how you can combine two colors to form a new color.
For this activity, you can use separate bowls to add circles of two different colors and then show the resulting color in another bowl with circles punched from a paper of the combined color. 🎨
White + Red – Pink can be visually shown with this activity.
Hole Punch Maths Problems
Another efficient way of using the hole-punched circles is to illustrate basic mathematical equations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
This activity of representing equations with circles makes it more visually understandable and fun to solve. ➕
Hole Punch Sight a Word
This method is an innovative way for kids to learn to identify words and has become my go-to literary activity for my son.
On a strip of paper, include a few words starting with the same letter, and let them punch a hole in the word they want to identify. 🔍
Hole Punch Sight a Letter
A method to help kids practice identifying letters from whole words.
Add a list of randomly picked words on a scrap of paper, and ask the kids to punch a hole only in specific letters that you read out. 🔎
Hole Punch Christmas Tree Ornaments
Spruce up your Christmas tree by incorporating handmade ornaments that make for a fun activity to do with your family.
Cut out different shapes on thick cardboard and decorate them with hole-punched circles. Punch a hole and tie a ribbon to finish. 🔔
Pro Tip:
You can cut the shapes of the Christmas ornaments with the elements associated with the holiday and also include the initials of the family members. You can also use shaped hole punches with Christmas-related designs to fill in the ornaments.
Hole Punch Christmas Tree Card
A simple card I make with my son to send our loved ones for Christmas every year.
You can print out a Christmas tree outline and let your kids punch holes wherever they want. Stick the tree over a colored card to create the illusion of the lights on the tree. Further, let them paint and decorate the tree with ornaments. 🎄
Hole Punch Fridge Magnet
Another craft that you can attempt to make is some simple DIY magnets.
Cut out the outline of any shape you want on a piece of cardboard. Fill this shape with punched circles of different colors to create patterns and monograms. Stick a magnet to the back of the cardboard, and put it on your refrigerator. 🧲
Hole Punch Keychains
My son enjoys making keychains at home.
Use bases made of medium-density fibreboard (MDF) to create beautiful keychains. Get creative in decorating it with hole-punched circles.
Pro Tip:
You can personalize keychains with the initials of the children for their bags. 🗝️
Hole Punch Photo Frames
Photo frames are a great way to display your family’s best and fondest moments.
Buy a plain photo frame from a craft store. Decorate the frame with hole-punched circles of different colors. You could also choose a theme to decorate on. 🖼️
Hole Punch Emotions Jar
An emotions jar is a great activity to help keep track of a child’s emotions. This jar can help you understand how your child mentally feels on a particular day.
Print a picture of a jar and allot colors to the different emotions. Ask your child to stick a punched circle daily, based on how they feel overall mentally that day. 😎
Pro Tip:
An emotions jar could be made into a calendar format, where your kids could stick a circle daily. This routine needn’t be restricted only to the kids and can include the entire family to help them understand and empathize with what the others are going through.
Conclusion:
My son and I love doing these activities and have made a lot of memories while doing them. He not only improved his motor skills but enjoyed the process of punching. These activities did boost his creativity and learning.
I hope you enjoyed reading the list of activities I have enumerated in this blog. Please comment below which of these activities you would recreate at home with your kids. 😇
I’m a former teacher (and mother of Two Childs) with a background in child development. Here to help you with play-based learning activities for kids. ( Check my Next startup Cledemy.Com)