Paper Plate Apple Basket

Last Updated on July 18, 2026 by Masha Eretnova

Looking for a fun fall apple craft with frugal materials? Use a paper plate to make this adorable apple basket with colorful apples for back-to-school season.

The whole craft takes no more than 30 minutes from start to finish and can be a great practice for cutting, gluing, and counting!

Supplies

• Paper plate
• Brown paint (acrylic, craft, poster paint will do)
• Paintbrush
• Colored cardstock or construction paper (red, green, yellow, and brown)
• Scissors (child-safe scissors if kids are helping)
• Glue stick

Paper Plate Apple Basket looks gorgeous but takes very few simple steps to make it and will work for kids of all ages, even little ones can help with gluing apples!

Steps To Make Paper Plate Apple Basket

Cut a half-circle opening across the top middle of a paper plate, leaving the outer rim attached to create the basket handle.

Paint the paper plate brown and allow it to dry completely. You can do several layers if you don’t like how dark the color is or if seeing white paper plate through the paint bothers you. Acrylics dry really really fast so it won’t take long.

Cut several apple shapes from colored paper. Pencil them up if you don’t feel confident doing it freehand.

Cut small brown rectangles for the stems and green leaf shapes. Try not to make rectangles too perfect, maybe a little narrower on one end, one thinner, one chunkier – to make it more natural 🙂

Glue one stem and one leaf onto the back of each apple.

Arrange the apples inside the basket opening, slightly overlapping them to make the basket look full.

Glue the apples in place behind the basket edge, leaving the tops visible.If you’d like, make an extra apple to glue outside the basket for decoration.

Tips For Using This Apple Craft

First of all, making a few apples of different colors will make the basket vibrant, but it is not mandatore, of course. You can have your apples of one color or of magic colors, too 🙂

To support learning numbers and colors you could actually make several baskets for kids to collect apples of certain color only or to practice math and basic calculations or a fruit market play (you can cut out different fruits!).

So this apple basket paper plate craft is amazing as a back to school and fall harvest season craft for school and home. If you wish to reuse the apples you should make them out of cardstock and could use double-sided tape to let kids “put” them inside the basket and take them out.