A school of fish: Animal Crafts

Malachi (my oldest student this year…7th grade) had a group math and chemistry class once a week, so we used the days he was gone as our craft days. The other children love cutting, coloring, pasting…all those types of activities…and Malachi finds them somewhat beneath him (ha!), so this worked out perfectly. He did join us for a few of these, though!

This frog life cycle craft was pretty fun, though it was mostly just cutting and gluing. (Good practice for Teddy, not quite as fun for the older girls.) https://www.easypeasyandfun.com/3d-frog-life-cycle-craft/ There were lots of cute ideas for similar crafts, such as this one:

from this blog here.

This chameleon painting activity was quite fun. You paint the plate with swirling colors, then put a cut-out chameleon on top and turn the plate to change his colors. The kids loved it. Instructions are here:

http://tippytoecrafts.blogspot.com/2012/11/colorful-chameleons.html

We made these cards near Christmastime and used them for some of our Light the World service…penguins are so cute for winter! Also they're Daisy's favorite animal. I chose mostly crafts that had to do with the children's favorites. You don't really even need a template for this card (it's just the basic "beak" or "mouth" pop-up) but here is one: https://www.easypeasyandfun.com/penguin-pop-up-card-template/

Malachi made an owl instead

These page-corner bookmarks are easy and fun to make. We made ours into pigs, but you can really make them into any animal (Teddy made a bunny). Here's a basic tutorial:

https://www.easypeasyandfun.com/pig-corner-bookmarks/

The older children are pretty good at sewing simple projects. This was a fun one. We made these little owl handwarmers for all the kids in Sam's and my church class, too (we teach the 9-10 year olds). You fill them with rice and then put them in the microwave for a few seconds to warm them up. You can find some instructions here https://craftyourhappiness.com/2014/12/22/quick-owl-hand-warmers/. If you use fleece, you don't need to finish the seams or turn them inside out or anything.

We made a few penguins too!

This craft was really fun because a.) my kids LOVE using Sharpies, which are usually forbidden, and b.) it's just fun to color on plastic sheet protectors! And the results were really pretty.

I had a bunch of animal stickers, so this was just a classification activity. Stickers are always fun.

One night for Family Night we played a game where everyone had to draw a picture making a case for which animal is "the best animal." It was cute to see what everyone came up with.