Decorate the classroom or the home with a mobile featuring a favorite underground animal.
Create this craft after a lesson on animals, niches, or ecosystems. After learning about animals that burrow underground, color a picture of a favorite tunneling animal to include in a mobile. Cut a plastic lid to look like the hole to a burrow. With the animal hanging beneath this “hole” it will look like the critter has just popped down to safety.
Burrowing Animal Mobile Materials
- Print out a coloring page of an animal that lives underground onto cardstock. If necessary to get the proper size, copy the image and place it into a word processing document and then increase or decrease the size of the image. Try to make the image just a bit smaller than the opening in the lid.
- Crayons, markers, colored pencils
- Brown tissue paper
- Glue
- Plastic lid
- Ribbon or yarn
- Hole punch
- Scissors
How to Make an Underground Animal Mobile
- Cut away the center of a plastic lid, just leaving the rim – this will be the opening to the animal’s tunnel.
- Wipe glue over the rim and wrap brown tissue paper around the rim. Optional: Add some construction paper grass around the top.
- Color the animal picture.
- Cut out the picture.
- Punch a hole in the animal image. For the effect of the animal diving down its hole, punch the hole near the back end of the image so the critter will hang nose down. For the effect of the animal climbing up from its burrow, punch the hole near the animal’s head.
- Tie a twelve-inch piece of ribbon or yarn onto the animal image.
- Tie a piece of ribbon or yarn from one side of the plastic lid rim to the other side.
- Tie the piece of yarn holding the animal around the piece of string going across the opening in the lid. Adjust until animal is both a few inches below the lid rim and there is enough ribbon to make a loop at the end of the ribbon.
- Slide the ribbon holding the animal until the lid rim balances over the image of the burrower.
- Optional – Add several pieces of brown ribbon or yarn around the rim so they hang down and gives the illusion of a tunnel. Add just enough yarn for the effect without hiding the animal from view.
- Hang the mobile.
Groundhog Day Craft
After talking about Groundhog Day, have the children make their predictions as to whether there will be six more weeks of winter or six more weeks until spring by angling the groundhog images so it appears to be either crawling out of the tunnel or crawling back into its den.
Use this simple mobile to highlight an animal recently studied in a lesson, seen at a zoo, or observed in the backyard.
The copyright of the article Create a Burrowing Animal Mobile in Kids Paper Crafts is owned by Susan Caplan. Permission to republish Create a Burrowing Animal Mobile in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
 |
