Keeping young learners engaged in their lessons is one of the biggest challenges that any teacher or tutor will face – kids have a stigma that learning is boring and uninteresting, so you’ll have to put thought and effort into your plans to ensure that the children remain interested and invested in what they’re learning. Incorporating crafts into lessons can help to make them feel more upbeat and enjoyable, with animal crafts being a particularly popular craft topic! If you’re struggling to find ways to incorporate animal crafts into your lessons, don’t worry – you can check out our top 4 suggestions below!
Animal Puppets
One of the most interactive activities that kids can take part in is role play, which is why crafting puppets is a great idea in the classroom. You can show your students how to create their own animal puppets using card by cutting out leg holes and decorating the puppet to their own wild imagination’s content, then have them engage and interact with each other by telling stories and acting out scenarios using their puppets! The opportunities really are open with these puppets – simply cut the card into the shape of the animal and cut holes so that you can use your fingers as the legs.
Themed Felt Packs
With our themed felt packs, you’ll be able to give your children more creative freedom to design the animal in the way that they want, giving them hours of fun choosing between the colours, materials, and decorations that they can use! There are lots of different animal packs to choose from, with frogs, fish, butterflies, available to design in as many different ways as you can imagine.
Paper Engineering
For a more intricate, fiddly, and focused animal crafts activity for your class, why not give paper engineering a try! Showing your class how to build and manipulate the paper to build their own designs encourages creativity and expression, which helps your students to grow into their own little person more and more every day. Our paper engineering kits come with a variety of different coloured paper so there’s plenty of choices when it comes to creating your own animal – mix and match colours as you choose to craft the perfect imaginary animal!
Stained Glass Creatures
A simpler but just as enjoyable activity is the use of stained glass creature outlines to give unique colours to a pre-arranged set of insect, bugs, and animals – simply hand these out to your class and let them add their own colour to the stained glass section; turn this into a class competition by giving out prizes, merits, or other achievement points to the best designs, or hang the finished product on the wall as a class display to give a personalised twist to the classroom.
Bringing animal crafts into the classroom can help young learners to feel more involved and engaged in what they’re learning, which ultimately makes your lessons, so don’t neglect the impact of a positive learning attitude and environment and keep your lessons fun, yet educational.