We’ve experienced very mixed weather this spring break. One minute we’re swimming in the sunny sea and the next we’re sheltering during an extremely cold hail storm. We love to spend as much time outdoors as we can, the kids love nature and mini beasts, so we made a craft which brings the mini beast garden indoors during those rainy days- A Mini Beast Garden Play Scene.
What you’ll need
A small cardboard box (ours was A4 sized)
A4 sheet green foam
green pipecleaners
lollipop sticks
foam flower shapes
foam mini beast shapes
foam offcuts
leaf cutouts (or cut out of green paper)
Bostik White Glue
Bostik Glue Dots
Pencil and scissors
Instructions
1. First stick the A4 foam sheet on top of the box using white glue.
2. Make the flowers for your garden. We made 9. Use glue dots to stick each layer onto the larger flower, then onto the leaves.
Use another glue dot to stick the flower onto the green pipe cleaner stem.
3. Stick each pipe cleaner flower into the green foam box.
4. Make a few more flowers to stick directly onto the green foam (these make good low flowers for the ladybirds to crawl around).
5. Add some leafy areas to your garden too (cut out green leaves and layer).
6. Make mini beasts for your garden as instructed below:
- Butterflies
Stick a Butterfly Foam Sticker onto a lollipop stick, make a slit in the box and push the stick into the slot. We made two butterflies (cut the shapes out of foam if you don’t have shaped stickers).
- Ladybirds/Ladybugs
Use ready made ladybird foam stickers and place them in the garden (we didn’t take the backing off so they can still be moved around). You can cut your own shape out of foam.
- Worm (top right)
Use a brown pipe cleaner as a garden worm (simple!).
- Woodlice (Pennysows) (top left)
Cut oval shapes out of brown parcel paper and add detail with felt tips.
- Bumble Bee
Use yellow foam/felt and black felt tip for the bees body, white card for his wings and cut and colour in the bee’s black antennae.
- Snail
Cut a slug shape out of card (glitter card in our case), add a pom pom shell and then a pipe cleaner antennae.
7. Add all of the bugs to the mini beast garden play scape.
8. Enjoy playing with your new small world, creative play, craft toy. Crawling bugs can be moved around the garden to make friends and find food.
Flying insects can fly, take in nectar from the flowers and land in a new slot.
On the next rainy day make more bugs to join them too- spiders, slugs, grasshoppers and dragonflies would all make great additions!
What mini beasts would you add to your garden?
We are Bostik Bloggers and each month make a themed craft using their glue products along with a box of Craft Merrily goodies.
Look out for next month’s “Weather” themed craft. Subscribe today to get it straight to your inbox.
What a GREAT idea – looking for crafts to START this spring Love being creative