Making cardboard animals is a great way to recycle excess cardboard and create fun pipecleaner crafts while educating your toddlers and preschool kids about sustainability. Follow this step-by-step guide to construct fun, easy, and cheap cardboard animals using pipecleaners and other common household craft supplies with your toddlers and kids.
This tutorial was inspired by Super Make It
How To Make Cardboard Animals:
Supplies:
For this project you will need:
- Pencil
- Paint Brushes
- Craft Paint
- Scissors
- Cardboard
- PDF Animal Shapes Template
Step 1: Gather Supplies
First, help your kids gather pipecleaners and any other household craft items and materials. Poofy pom pom balls, and googly eyes both work great for decorating your crafty cardboard animal creations.
Step 2: Draw your animal shapes
First, draw the basic animal shapes onto the cardboard with your pencil. If you'd rather not freehand it, download the PDF template I created here and use it to help your kids trace their fun animal craft shapes onto the cardboard.
Step 3: Cut out your cardboard animals
Next, use your scissors to cut out the cardboard animal shapes. Depending on the thickness, cardboard can sometimes be difficult to cut through, so you may need to help your kids with this step.
Step 4: Paint your cardboard shapes
Have fun painting your animal craft pieces with your kids and also don't be afraid of using bright colors to bring your cardboard animals to life.
Step 5: Add details and decorate
After the base coat dries, cut out the shapes and then, have fun decorating them with your kids and experiment with adding pipecleaner tails to these fun crafts. You can also make your animal designs come to life by adding googly eyes and other creative animal traits. Googly eyes, for example, are great for bringing your creations to life. You may want to consider adding cotton balls and poofy pom poms so that your animals have additional furry texture.
Step 6: Assemble your animals
Finally, use scissors to cut the slits in your cardboard animals and assemble them, so they stand up. You can also use a dab of craft glue to reinforce them if needed.
Creating simple cardboard animals using old packaging materials makes a perfect rainy day activity for preschool kids. It puts your cardboard packaging to good use and also lets kids use their imaginations to play pretend. Creating cute crafts for kids is an excellent way to spend quality family creative time with your children.
For more easy cheap crafts for kids at home, be sure to check out my post on how to dye chickpeas for your toddlers sensory bin.
Also, if you used this tutorial to make your own animal cardboard cutouts, be sure to tag @howdybabybox over on Instagram to share your unique creations! What are your favorite homemade crafts for kids? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Check out more fun family crafts available on our blog.