Any teacher will tell you that using glue sticks in the classroom is no simple feat! Issues range from lost lids and sticks wound up too high to sticky desks and flappy paper corners - just to name a few! 😅

The reality is that, just like many other classroom routines, there’s a whole range of micro-skills that need to be taught explicitly to avoid these common mishaps. In this blog post, we’re covering:

How to teach glue stick etiquette - all of those important skills!
Fun activity ideas to help kids master the art of the glue stick.
A free song and video to make glue time the best part of the day.

Teaching Glue Stick Etiquette

While using a glue stick seems like a routine task, there’s actually a lot going on before, during and after the attaching of paper! This is why it’s important, especially with younger children, to explicitly teach every skill you want them to master independently. With consistent modelling and plenty of practice, your days of dried-out sticks and lost worksheets will be far behind you!

Here’s a list of things you may need to demonstrate to your class (probably more than once!) during this phase:

How to twist and pull the lid off the glue stick and placing it down in a “safe spot” on the desk - on a name tag or in a pencil case is a good idea.
Putting the lid back on when you’re finished - and listening for the ‘click’!
Winding the glue up and back - but not too far either way!
Using the right amount - not too little, not too much.
Sticking paper straight into a workbook, with no overhanging edges, and finding the next blank page rather than a random spot in the middle of the book.
Putting the glue on the paper, not the paper on the glue.
The gluing technique. This comes down to personal preference, but some common methods are:
- A line around the outside and a big ‘X’ from corner to corner.
- A dot in each corner and a small cross in the middle.
- One continuous zig-zag across the page.

There’s more to teach than you might think! For very young children, it’s worth breaking these steps into multiple mini-lessons and repeating them often - Lesson One might literally just be taking the lid off and on! It’s also important to show ‘non-examples’ - for example, you could show students a piece of paper stuck into a workbook with the edges hanging over and ask them, ‘is this how we stick our paper in?’. Then have them demonstrate the correct way to glue a piece of paper into their books.

Visual reminders of these steps can be very helpful to reference, too. Make an anchor chart that includes the skills you’ve learned so far, and add to it as you teach more.

If you’re a Cub Club subscriber, you can download our Glue Stick Wall Displays - these full-colour posters match the lyrics in our free Glue Stick Song video to really make the concept ‘stick’!

Activity Ideas

Practising your glue stick skills needn’t be a chore - there are plenty of ways to make it fun and even tie it in with your literacy and numeracy lessons! Here are a few ideas to add to your planner this week.

Mosaic Squares Cut & Paste

The possibilities are endless with this classic craft. For the first weeks of Foundation/Kindergarten, try printing each child’s name in a large bubble font. Have students use their glue sticks to ‘trace’ the inside of each letter before pressing down squares of coloured paper. It’s a fantastic way to create a beautiful mosaic name! You can easily adapt this for your ‘Letter of the Week’ or ‘Number of the Day’, too.

Cub Club Subscribers can grab our Mosaic Art Letter Craft or Mosaic Art Cut & Paste activities below.

Paper Chains

Decorate your space while practising precision gluing! Demonstrate how to put a small dab of glue on one end of a paper strip, then carefully press and hold the other end to create a loop. Repeat the process by threading the next strip through and closing the circle. This is a versatile, low-prep activity you can use for:

Hands-on Numeracy: Have students make a target number of loops. Display them as a visual representation of different quantities.
Themed Decorations: Use specific colours for Valentine’s Day, Halloween or other seasonal festivities
Gratitude Chain: Have students write or draw one thing they’re thankful for on each strip before adding it to the adding it to the class display.

Hot tip: Remind the kids to count to five while holding the ends together - this gives the glue a chance to ‘grip’ and prevents the chain from popping open!

Curriculum connection activities

The best way to turn gluing from an isolated lesson into a habit is to weave it in to your daily literacy and numeracy activities. By choosing cut-and-paste activities, you’re giving students a purposeful reason to practice this skill. Here are a few ways to integrate these skills:

Tens Frames: Have students glue paper circles into a tens-frame for a hands-on counting activity that develops fluency with tens facts.

Literacy Hunts: Recycle those old magazines by having students cut out letters or pictures that start with a certain letter to make an alphabet collage. This could be adapted for rhyming words, syllable counting, digraphs and trigraphs, numbers, shapes, colours and more! You can also try our Letter Match printable for a low-prep initial sounds activity.

Sentence Jumbles: Cutting up words from a sentence and having students paste them in the correct order is a classic reading group activity that can improve gluing skills too! Cub Club subscribers can save on prep time with our Sentence Jumble printable, featuring 50 cut-and-paste worksheets catering to every reading level in the first year of school - ready to print and glue!

Number Strip Puzzles: Practise skip counting and sequence recognition alongside gluing skills! Provide students with numbered strips of paper to be glued in the correct order. This is a great test of their alignment skills - making sure the strips sit flush against each other. You can make it extra fun with our Number Strip Puzzles (see below for the full set), featuring cute images for kids to reveal and colour in (with a bonus ‘self-checking’ feature - if the picture looks off, the numbers might be out of order!)

Punctuation Cut-and-Paste: If you’re exploring different kinds of sentence types, why not use it as an excuse to get the glue sticks out? Instead of grabbing a pencil, provide students with a sheet of printed full stops, question marks and exclamation marks. They can cut them out and stick the correct punctuation at the end of pre-written sentences. Cub Club subscribers can grab our Decodable End Punctuation printable, with punctuation activities tailored to all reading levels in the first year of school.

Other cut-and-paste activities

Any time students use their glue stick is a great opportunity to reinforce those explicit skills. Don’t be afraid to get creative with arts and crafts! But if you’re out of inspiration, here are a few more Cub Club resources that will sharpen those fine motor skills and improve your students’ gluing habits.

Free Glue Stick Song & Video

At Pevan & Sarah, we know that teaching (and re-teaching!) glue stick etiquette can feel a bit tedious. That’s why we created the Glue Stick Song - a free song and video that covers all the things kids need to know about using a glue stick.

This disco banger will stick in your head as easily as paper on a page! Instead of reciting a long list of rules, you can simply have a sing and dance with your class every time you get the glue sticks out!

Watch for free now in Cub Club.

Want more fine motor skills resources?

Whether it's teaching kids about Pencil Grip, learning the correct Scissor Grip or warming up those little muscles with our Finger Gym series, a Cub Club subscription gives you full access hundreds of videos and printables for teaching fine motor skills, as well as literacy, numeracy, social/emotional skills and more! Try Cub Club today with a 7 day free trial and see for yourself!

So tell us - how do you glue in your classroom? Have we missed any great gluing activity ideas in this blog post? Get in touch via our Contact form to share your thoughts!

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How to Teach Glue Stick Skills in an Early Years Classroom