DIY toddler-friendly turtle crafts from paper plates and recycled materials to bring learning about these turtally awesome reptiles to life.
Montessori Cultural unit studies are by far the most requested by my children and crafts make learning opportunities even more fun! Moreover, if we can involve even the youngest members of the homeschooling club, then it’s totally a win-win! Besides, you will be using recyclable items around your home, so no specialized craft materials are required. So, let’s make these toddler-friendly recycled DIY paper plate turtle crafts to shellebrate these awesome reptiles.
Paper Plate Turtle Crafts
YOU’LL Need for Paper Plate Turtle Crafts
- a paper plate
- recycled packing brown paper or tissue paper
- buttons
- glue
- paints (we used tempra sticks since they dry very fast and this green piant)
- Sea Turtle Cut-Outs PDF (see below/ courtesy of Julia)
P.S. Julia (11 yr) hand-drew these turtle body parts cut-outs! She definitely has an artistic side and a patience to do it too! Thank you Julia!
How to Make this Toddler-Friendly Recycled DIY
- Color the bottom of a paper plate green.
- Once dryed, glue bottons to the buttom of the plate.
- Over the buttons, glue brown or tissue paper.
- Print the parts of a turtle on a light green paper or on white paper and offer a child to color them.
- Cut out the body parts.
- Glue the body parts onto the paper plate as shown in the picture.
SKILLs Practiced During Paper Plate Turtle Crafts
- hand-eye coordination
- focused attention
- fine motor control
- dexterity
- learning through play while fostering imagination and creativity
AGE 2 Y+. Always supervise your child!
Why Encourage Coloring During Early Years
Offering children to color is important in early childhood education for many reasons! First of all, coloring helps develop hand strength and fine motor skills. Since toddlers and preschoolers are learning to build strength in small muscles of the hands, it is essential to offer plenty of opportunities to practice the skill. Moreover, hand strength is essential for hand-related fine motor coordination exercises, such as hand-writing. Since writing requires hand strength and dexterity, coloring is a fun way to help exercise small hand muscles. Hand strength also supports a child’s proper pencil grip, which is part hand strength and part practice, and coloring provides practice for both!
Secondly, offering a child an opportunity to color stimulates creativity and engages their independence and self-expression. What color should it be? Should I combine two colors? What about shading? How hard should I press the pencil? The harder a child colors, the more vivid the color is. Or, should I use a lot of colors or just one color? When a child is coloring, they are learning colors, shapes, and how objects/living things look!
Lastly, besides improving fine motor coordination, coloring is also a great focus-building exercise. Sustaining focused attention is a learned skill that is acquired with practice. Focus helps children complete a task from start to finish, and it is important to practice it during early years. Eventually, you will notice drawings become more intricate and detailed as they take more time to complete.
*Turtle Paper Plate Toddler Craft Tissue Paper 
*Turtle Paper Plate Toddler Craft Brown Paper
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Can you tell which body-parts cut-outs coloring was Adrian‘s and which one was Julia’s? They each had a set to color the sea turtle body-parts.
Crafting and painting are very important for early childhood development since it helps the body and brain to integrate tactile information in a creative way. Moreover, toddler-friendly recycled DIY projects are not only fun but educational! Process art is perfect for little artists since the focus lies in the creation of the work, not the outcome! During this fun artistic process, your child learns how colors work while developing spatial awareness and sensory integration. And it’s FUN!
Process Art is a very exciting modern form of art that works great with children since it is all about the process rather than a result. Guggenheim states “process art emphasizes the ‘process of making art”. As such, process art is all about the experience children are having while they are expressing their creativity! The MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) explains that “in process art, the means count for more than the ends.” So, let your child’s imagination, ingenuity, and creativity go wild while they are happily engaged in the PROCESS of ART.
This came out turtally awesome? What do you think? Which one do you like better: brown paper packaging or buttons tissue paper craft? Leave a comment below!
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