After reading Julia Dweck’s e-book, “Humpfree, The Humpless Camel” (you can read about it here), the creative juices of our family began to flow. ( There are affiliate links within this post for your convenience.)
We’ve spent the past two weeks doing nothing but camel crafts: two humps, one hump, and Flatback camels were all accounted for!
The first craft the children made were handprint camels. This is one of the crafts in “Christmas Crafts For Kids: 100+ Activities, Crafts, and Recipes based on Children’s Books” by Beth Gorden (In this book the craft is based on Humphrey’s First Christmas by Carol Heyer). Both children loved painting their own hands and making a print on their papers. After it was dry they added some facial features and painted sand and sky to complete their pictures.
The second craft they did was also based on Beth Gorden’s book. Kallista made a two-humped camel from an egg carton, cardboard and clothespins.
Tristan used the same idea, but instead of using the egg-holding side of the egg carton, he used the lid and made a Flatbacked camel! He’s obsessed with the Flatback!
Then to have some extra fun with Tristan’s Flatbacked camel, we took out another craft the children made last week and used their pinecone critters and pretended they were porcupines using Humpfree as a soft bed.
Another way Humpfree, The Humpless Camel tried to create humps for himself was with feathers.
Kallista received a cute little stuffed camel from her Canadian Aunt for her birthday last year. We call it Kammi. If you’ve heard of the song “Alice The Camel”, then you can guess what we’ve been singing. Kammi the camel has 2 humps, Kammi the camel has 2 humps, Kammi the camel has2 humps, Go Kammi Go, as we count down and fold over the humps on Kammy. We’ve been singing this since the week Kammy arrived, and it’s so fitting now! You can see Kammi in this photo of the children reading about Humpfree.
I have been doing a cultural exchange with someone from Uzbekistan and in his last package we received a couple of postcards, including this one with a two-headed camel. Although the one in this scene is a statue, he says that they do exist. One strange fact is that he says camels are common in the urban areas and put to work, camels are very rare to see in the wild.
Since Tristan made a bean bag pancake in the spring, he’s been wanting to sew some more. So we brought out the felt and made a pattern. Tristan did very well with his pattern, but the camel’s neck was too thin to cut or sew, so we used my attempt. We made the patterns while at the library one afternoon. We found a photo of one in the children’s encyclopedia to use for inspiration. Tristan wanted a Flatbacked camel, but settled for a one-humped camel for a little variety as he already had one and no-humped camels.
I think Tristan did a great job with his sewing on this one. And we can use it for a Christmas decoration so it serves as a double-purpose camel as well. Always great to have many uses for something!
The weather here has turned quite nasty this week with wind and torrential rain that we’ve been caught out in. On Tuesday we stayed indoors and caught up on this and that. To burn off some steam the children came up with this idea all on their own, and have been having a ball doing it ever since. Tristan is a Flatbacked camel and Kallista is going for a ride to save the world.
If you enjoy bringing books to life, please see some of the other book activities we’ve done:
Browse through our pages on books and book activities and felt crafts for more crafty ideas!
