PAPER PLATE DINO

Last year after returning to the UK from an Easter visit to the Canadian Prairies, my mom, aka, Nana, kept connected with Tristan by doing crafts with him over the webcam.  Doing crafts must be their favourite thing, and it’s nice that they can share this love together an ocean apart.  On this particular day they made a paper plate dino.

The date was set, the required items gathered up, the webcam was started up and away they went!

The items needed for this paper plate dino are:

• 2 paper plates of the same size
• stapler
• paint and paintbrush
• marker
• any extra embellishments you may like to use

The first order of business was to cut one paper plate as you see below:

If your child is able to cut pretty well, you can draw the lines on the plate for them to use as a guide.  For younger children, you may have to cut the paper plate.

Take your second paper plate and fold it over like this:

Use a stapler or help your child with it to staple the pieces of the first paper plate into the fold of the second paper plate like the photo below.  Then fold over the two long strips from the centre of your first paper plate to use for legs.

This is the part that Tristan loved most:  drawing a face on his paper plate dino because he was so excited to see it!    He was happy to paint his dino as well!  It took such concentration to get it just right.

When the paint dried he painted the other side as well.  Kallista made one as well and we had both of them in a display we made on our living room mirror for at least a month.  Being a mirror, it didn’t photograph well.  But when Tristan saw me writing this blog he wanted to make another paper plate dino right away!  So what’s a mother to do?  Get out the paper plates and paint, of course!  Here is a photo of their new dinosaurs:

Looking for more ideas with dinosaurs?  Visit our dinosaur page to see our other dino projects, or stop by our cardboard crafts page for more paper plate crafting ideas.