Paper Crafts for Children

Little fingers will love covering the paper plate with sticky spots to make this friendly spider. Attach a loop under the paper plate and this spider can also become a hand puppet.

	Hand over a paper plate and some sheets of spot stickers and let the spotting begin.
	Poke four pairs of holes into the sides of the paper plate and thread a chenille stick through each pair of holes as pictured.
	Add some googly eyes and you are done.

Paper plates might have a minor use at parties – making the cleaning up easier, but I think they may really have been invented for use in paper crafts for children. I have never intentionally looked for paper plate crafts, but have just kept finding lots of great ideas – here are all the ones I have found so far.

	Paper Plate Ladybug Hand Puppet The perfect critter to make with circles is a ladybug of course!
	St Patricks Day Paper Plate Door Hanger This link is a real pot of gold.
	Paper Plate Fish A perfect follow up craft for any fishy story.
	Paper Plate Sunflower Cheer up any day with this fabulous flower craft.
	Paper Plate Chicken It is a snip to make this cute chick.

Use lots of hand shapes and a paper plate to make this chirpy chick!

	You will need: Paper plate 1 red hand shape, 2 yellow hand shapes, 2-6 white hand shapes Glue
	Assemble the shapes as pictured. For the red comb and yellow feet we thought that the chicken looked better without the thumb on each hand shape. On the wings we layered up some hand shapes and curled the fingers a little to give the wings a feathery look.

This is a good craft for little hands as the pieces are quite large and not too fiddly. Parents can prepare the cut outs and let the child do the painting and glueing. Older children can adapt this to create all sorts of hand puppet creatures.

You will need 2 paper plates, black construction card, 2 googly eyes, some red paint and glue.

Cut two sets of legs from a sheet of black card. I laid the paper plate over the card and traced an outline of the side of the plate to give me the size I needed.

Glue the legs on opposite sides of the top edge of one of the plates. Allow to dry. Turn the second plate over and glue the edges of both plates together. You could use a stapler to attach the plates and legs together. Cut the bottom of the plates off to allow for your hand to be inserted into the cavity. Paint the top plate red and allow to dry.

Cut six circles and a face piece from the black card. I also cut a thin strip to represent the wings of the ladybug. Glue in place. Add the googly eyes and take your ladybug for a fly around.

So easy, so cute, and perfect for children’s own artistic fish interpretation.

I am always on the lookout for paper crafts for children that are simple to set up and give a great result like this paper plate fish. I love that there is no waste!

Cut a triangle out of one side of the paper plate for the mouth.

Glue it onto the other side to make the tail. As quick as that, your fishy shape is now ready for decoration.

We decorated our paper plate fish by dabbing some paint on. The little dabber pictured here is really handy, I have some more about them at Dabber for Applying Paint. First we dabbed on some green paint.

Then we dabbed on some blue paint. For the final touches our fish just needed a sprinkle of glitter and an eye and she was ready to swim away onto our wall.