Make a cardboard dinosaur craft for your dino loving kids with this super simple cut and slot method of construction! Great for older kids to do alone or to make for little ones to decorate and play with on a rainy day.
Cardboard dinosaur craft for kids!
Cardboard truly is the BEST art material available as far as I am concerned. We have made so many fun creations using cardboard boxes and off-cuts, including baby toys, learning games, art materials and entire play structures!
It is a brilliant material for cutting, decorating and construction because it is lightweight and a blank canvas for adding colour to. I have recently been making the kids some animal sculptures using cardboard and setting them out as a blank invitation to decorate and build. One set that I made were these simple dinosaur shapes and it was lots of fun to create them into finished sculptures together!
I cut out body shapes to represent (loosely) a Diplodocus, Stegosaurus and T-Rex and ten cut two pairs of legs for each separately. These slotted into the bodies by simply cutting slits into the body and top of the pairs of legs where they met together. By spacing them out evenly the dinosaurs were able to stand up independently too!
I actually rather love them the best when left as plain cardboard, but the kids got to decorate them using whichever materials they wanted. They chose oil pastels which work so well as a paint substitute and can create really lovely blending effects too.
I love the effect of the ridges of cardboard here in the pattern made on T-Rex! Another colour over the top would have made it really interesting too and even textured in appearance.
A lovely addition to these would be scrunched tissue paper and other textured collage materials. Perhaps we will add those to our other animal shapes we have ready to go!
These look lovely standing up as sculptures on a shelf. They would also be fabulous hanging on a mobile, but you’d have to hot glue the legs into place so that they stayed secure.
Use this cardboard dinosaur craft alongside some favourite dinosaur stories, then follow it up with some more great dinosaur themed play and learning activities!
Try our:
dinosaur small world play
and you can search our full DINOSAUR PLAY ARCHIVES here for loads more ideas!