If I wanted to make animal crafts with kids, there are two ways I would do so. I do not make any of those paper plate animal crafts or any number of copycat crafts that you will find all over the web. How I decide to make the animal crafts with the kids will depend on the types of art I want the children to do and what the goal of the project is. One way to way to work on animal crafts is to have the children make animal sculptures with clay. I discuss this a bit in my post on clay modeling for kids  and you can find out more details about it there. Sometimes you can make dioramas with the children that are scenes that include animals and the children can make them out of polymer clay as well.

I however, am going to concentrate in this post on a more two dimensional style of animal crafts be it farm animal crafts, jungle animal crafts, zoo animal crafts or sea animal crafts.

The first thing you have to decide is what type of animal crafts you want the kids to make. If you are working with preschoolers and are looking for  farm animal crafts for preschoolers or zoo animal crafts for preschoolers and are not interested in the coloring pages that are out there then you may want to consider making individual murals with the children. These would be scenes of the habitats of the animals you want the children to make.

The project may be based on something like a trip to the zoo or some farm animals crafts after a visit to a farm. I assume that the jungle crafts for kids won’t be after a trip to the jungle but, may be included in a teaching unit or  theme.

It may be a good idea to have images of the types of scenes that these different animals would inhabit. Zoos, farms, jungles and under the sea scenes are all vastly different habitats for the various animals. Below are just a few images to give you an idea of the type of pictures you may want to share with the children.

.

 

After you know the type of animals and scene you will have the children recreate, you would then discuss with the children the kind of backgrounds we need to create for the animals that they are going to make.These backgrounds will be a combination of painting and some added collage work followed by the creation of the animals.

I would start out by having them paint their backgrounds. Some kind of blue for under the sea, mixtures of green and brown for the bottoms of the zoo and farm scenes and blue for the sky and for the jungles I would assume a few different greens.(This is the method I use when creating murals with groups of children as well)

I would then give the children a bunch of items that would help them decorate their painting backgrounds. If its a zoo scene I may give them a bunch of things like craft sticks, toothpicks and other straight things that will help them make cages. For jungles maybe lots of brown rectangles and  green shaped leaves to add as trees, for farms, maybe shapes they can use to make farmhouse etc. If you like doing recycled crafts for kids then you will most probably have lots of materials hanging around that you can use. Maybe that seaweed  looking stuff that can be added to some of the scenes.

After that is done I would work with them on the animals. There are two ways to do that. You can either just give them animal print papers, some googly eyes and scissors and tell them to make animals. Or you can give them pictures of the different animals and discuss how they would make them. Then they can cut out the animals and past them into their pictures.

I once had a little boy who wanted to make a giraffe. So I said to him “What does a giraffe have?” so he said ” along neck” so I said so make that, so he did. I then asked him what else and he said a head and feet etc and he kept adding to the image until he had a very satisfactory giraffe.

The animals don’t have to be sophisticated and if you give them images of animals make sure you give them the animals in different positions. They then draw the animals on paper with markers and cut them out.

The images below were zoo animal crafts that we did after going on a trip to the zoo.

For this activity we didn’t do an elaborate background treatment. We just gave them materials like window screen netting, sticks of different thicknesses and animal papers.

We then went over with them the things they saw at the zoo and told them to try to recreate some of their experiences using the materials we had given them. Below are some of their results.

Don’t forget that you are always going to give a variety of results based on the ages of the children. The image above with the animal paper just slapped on was of course, much younger that the one of the animal above behind the fence. The only way I advice to direct them is to help them think what parts the animal that they want to make has and to keep them thinking it through on their own.

I just found this post called elephant art project that is somewhat similar to what I talked about here that will really add to your animal crafts. check it out