ACTIVITY: Making a Folded Paper Animal

Crafts are a wonderful way to help build your child’s language skills. Here is one craft that is fun to do together. Although the instructions look lengthy, this craft is actually quick and easy to do. This craft is adapted from: Making a Folded Paper Bear by Brenda Boreham. See specific instructions below.

Creating the Folded Animal

Make a folded animal along with your child. You can talk about what you are doing and compare notes, which is great for language development. For example, you could say, “Wow, you are cutting the circle really well” or “Look, the ears on my bear are bigger”.

This craft is great for reinforcing school-related vocabulary like “trace”, “fold” and “overlap”.

This craft also provides lots of practice in following instructions.

Have your child take a turn “being the teacher”! If your child is old enough, they can read the instructions for one section and check if you follow them correctly. Make one or two mistakes on purpose for your child to catch.

Playing with the Folded Animals

Take another look at your animals and compare and contrast their features. What is the same? What is different? This helps your child think about the attributes of objects, such as colour, size and shape.

Tell stories using the masks. Emphasize using lots of expression when telling a story. You could model telling a story in a monotone voice. Have your child retell the story with lots of expression. This helps build your child’s memory for retelling stories and gives them practice using their voice to add interest to the story.

Making the Folded Animals

You will need:

2-3 sheets of construction paper

Brown and black for a bear
Green and black for a frog
Gray and black for a wolf
Blue and green for a hummingbird

1 glue stick
1 pair of scissors
1 felt marker

Cut a circle shape

Trace a big circle on one piece of construction paper.

Hint – you can trace around a small plate or plastic lid

Cut out the circle.

Fold the circle

Fold the circle in half.
Fold it in half again.
Open it out flat.
Cut along one of the middle folds to the middle.

Overlap and glue

Overlap the two quarters where you cut the paper.
Glue the overlapped pieces together.

Make the ears (if needed)

Trace or draw two small circles.
Cut out the two circles.
Glue the ears on to the face (from behind).

Hint – you could cut tiny slits of paper on the edge of the ears to make them look furry

Make the nose and snout or beak

Draw and cut out a triangle for the snout or beak.
Snip off the narrow end.
Fold the snout or beak in half.
Glue the snout beak over the fold on the mask.
Draw and out triangle for the nose (if needed).
Fold the nose in half.
Glue the nose onto the end of the snout.

Add eyes and whiskers

Cut out eyes and glue them on the face.
Draw the mouth and whiskers (if needed) with a black marker.

Hint – you can also cut out whiskers from paper and curl them around the end of a pencil before gluing.

How did this craft go for you? Let me know your ideas for working on speech and language skills while creating and playing with these folded animals.