Animal craft book activity (guest post)

As promised, today we have a guest post from Maggie Woodley of the Red Ted Art blog! Red Ted Art is a wonderful blog for all things crafty, and features kids crafts (suitable 18mths – 10yrs) and weekly tutorials (suitable for older children and adults). She has one son – known as “Red Ted”, and a little girl – “Pip Squeak”. 🙂 I’m excited that Maggy is sharing one of her ideas that ties in perfectly with our recent Animal Week post.

Loo Roll Animal Zoo

This craft is inspired by the book Who’s Hiding by Satoru Onishi.

Maggy says:

I bought this book ages ago for Red Ted, who was less interested in it. Maybe it is an age thing, I don’t know? Pip Squeak (coming up to 20 mths) adores it and has for quite some time. The book is simple: each double spread page has 24 animals depicted (see book cover below). They are drawn in a simple colourful style. As you turn the pages, the background changes in colour – e.g. blue, so that in that case the bunny and pig “disappear” as their body colour blends into the background colour (see cover, they are blue) and the child is asked “who is hiding?”… To mix it up a little, there is also a “Who is sleeping?” and a “Who is crying?” page etc. And the page that mine like best: ”Who is backward?” For some reason, in our house this translates into “Who is showing us their bottom?”… and Pip Squeak loves tapping her bottom and saying “Po-Po” (in German). Very sweet, simple book with appeal to “design geeks”.

The Craft
It dawned on me one day (as we were reading the book AGAIN), that some of the animals were perfect “loo/toilet paper roll shapes”. Trim a bit at top and bottom for ears and legs and hey presto….

Materials: Loo/toilet paper rolls, paint, bits of felt, glue , black marker pen for features and googly eyes (optional)

The googly eyes are optional – on some of the animals I cut out paper eyes and I have to say, I prefer these, as they look more like the original book.. but you know how much children love the googly eyes! The kids painted the rolls the colors of the animals in the book.

Once dried, I cut out some ears and some feet. Red Ted helped me stick on googly eyes and other features. E.g. for the lion’s mane, we cut a circular piece of felt with squiggly edges and cut a whole in the center … For the elephant and rabbit we had painted an extra blue loo roll to cut ears from. For the rabbit’s ears, we glued on the elephant’s ear’s we “slotted” into “slats” we cut. And for example the cat’s ears are part of the original roll – I just cut the roll “down” – leaving two triangles.

Caution: you may be roped into making 24 animals – which quite some task… I reigned it in after 8, that was quite enough!!!!

Thanks Maggy at Red Ted Art for sharing this wonderful idea! It’s a great way to recycle materials into something creative that the children can actually play with afterwards. I also love how the craft ties into the book. This is a great book activity, and during our Book Study of “Literacy Beginnings” (Fountas & Pinnell), the authors talk about how children respond to literature by participating in an activity after reading it. I can see many games of “Who’s Hiding” being played with these!!

You can see Maggy’s entire post and more pictures at www.redtedart.com/2011/07/06/kids-crafts-loo-roll-animal-zoo