Originally when I was coming up with clever titles this was called Elephants or as Batman says, “Funtes”
Or at least that’s the nearest approximation I can spell of it. As part of our zoo unit, we created a homemade zoo animals book with fun craft projects. We’re going to talk about the fun craft part of this project in this post, we created the animals over several weeks as we had time as part of homeschooling preschool.
Also, this is obviously Future Ticia 2019 talking about something her kids did 10 years ago. I’m attempting to make this an actual useful post now.
Future Ticia 2022, I’m updating with the new logos, but I’m also a little lazy and am not replacing every single one.
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Step 1 of making your homemade zoo animals book
Go to the Jan Brett mural site. There I printed off the elephants, lions, leopards, and a whole bunch of the animals. You could print off all of them, but I only printed off a few. As Future Ticia, I wish I’d printed off more, but this became quite a huge project….
Homemade Zoo Animals book: elephants
1. Let your kids color the elephants.
2. Have them tear up gray and black and white construction paper into little pieces. After I had this done I figured out to tear the paper into smaller strips to begin with. Oh well, live and learn. Otherwise, they lose patience and interest in tearing up the paper. Future Ticia here, this picture is of another project where I did learn to cut it into strips.
3. Next take your box of scraps and let your kids glue them onto the elephants. This makes the elephant look all wrinkled like they do in real life. Or, that’s the theory.
4. You can use the same idea to create monkeys or penguins. Tearing paper is a great fine motor skill.
Homemade zoo animals book: giraffe and leopard
1. Get a piece of cardboard or foam core board or maybe the side of a cereal box. Cut them out to about half the size of a sheet of paper. I used the side of a cereal box, because it’s free.
2. Find a bunch of circle foam stickers, something that is slightly raised. I used lots and lots of circles and a few numbers. This is to make the texture of the giraffe and the leopard.
3. Rub the side of a crayon over the page, creating a fun texture pattern.
The next animal: zebra!
Step 1 again. Get a piece of cardboard or foam core board or maybe the side of a cereal box. Cut them out to about half the size of a sheet of paper. I used the side of a cereal box, because it’s free.
2. For the second one take a bottle of glue and make squiggly lines all up and down the board in the same direction. This will produce the stripes on the zebra.
3. Now, just like last time you rub the crayon and get a nice little pattern. Also, I just love his little tongue sticking out as he concentrates.
You can also purchase texture rubbing boards, but I wanted to try making the texture rubbing boards in keeping with our homemade zoo animals book. Now rub the side of a crayon on a piece of paper while on top of the board, and it’ll look really cool.
Finally, for the homemade zoo animals book: lion
1.Print off your lion, and then color it.
2. Glue as much yarn on your lion as you want. My kids want lots and lots of yarn.
The final result of our lion, also includes the final pages, we put together where each animal came from originally, its habitat, and what it ate.
Finishing the homemade zoo animals book
As I said, we put information for each animal. I googled images and printed them off, which is why there is not currently a printable for this craft because I didn’t create a printable I can share, this is before I knew important things about copyright laws.
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Fun elephants! Thanks for linking. I love to see what you all are doing 🙂 Have a great week~