Caroline
Making crafts based on children’s books is a great way to bring books to life for young children. National Book Lover’s Day is on August 9th so try celebrating with a trip to your local library and then have fun creating a book inspired craft at home. These silly paint smash monster puppets we are sharing today are a super fun process art activity for kids and they go along great with any monster-themed children’s book.
The best part of this craft is how it’s almost impossible to make only one monster. The smash painting process will keep kids enthralled and entertained for hours. Kids will love making dozens of variations of blobs with different colors and amounts of paint. This activity also creates a great opportunity for children to learn their colors and delve a bit into color mixing.
Supplies Needed:
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- white cardstock
- construction paper
- paint
- jumbo adhesive craft sticks
- googly eyes
- scissors
- glue
Instructions:
1. Fold your cardstock
Begin by folding your white cardstock in half to make a crease in the middle of the paper and then open back up the paper.
2. Paint the paper
Add paint to the middle of your paper. Get as creative as you’d like with the amount of colors you use and the different designs you make with your paint. You can make swirls, straight lines, squiggly lines or dots. After adding your paint, fold your cardstock in half again and smash the paint down between the two halves of the paper to create your colorful, silly monster face. Use your fingers to rub the paper from the crease outward to spread the paint out across the paper.
3. Let it dry
When you are finished smashing and rubbing your paint, open your paper to see the colorful blob that was created. Let the paint sit to dry completely.
4. Cut out face & glue to the stick
When your paint is dry cut out your monster face and attach it to your jumbo adhesive craft stick. If you can’t find an adhesive craft stick simply glue your monster face onto a regular jumbo craft stick.
5. Make limbs and hair
Cut out several different construction paper pieces to create limbs and hair for your monster puppet. Glue them onto your puppet. Give your monster puppet extra personality by bending and folding the construction paper pieces to add extra texture. You can add curls to the hair by wrapping the pieces around a pencil or add accordion folds to the arms and legs.
6. Glue eyes & draw a smile
Finish your monster puppets craft by gluing on 1, 2, 5, 10 or however many googly eyes you’d like your monster to have. Then add a cute smile with your black marker.
Now that your monster puppets craft is finished it’s time for play!
Use your puppets to put on a special puppet show for Mom, Dad or with friends in the classroom. Have fun reenacting one of your favorite monster books or create your own story.
