In our 31 days of activities; today we have Thimble and Twig on the site. She is going to share with you a coffee filter craft, and a butterfly nature art activity to do with your kids.
Do your kids love to collect nature items when you’re out on a walk?
Here are three butterfly nature crafts for you to make with your kids to display their nature finds from a walk. Kids love butterflies, they are beautiful creatures and magical – almost fairylike!
Anything can be used to make your nature butterflies…….leaves, petals and flowers are our favourite materials that we use to make nature butterflies but you can experiment with any nature materials you like! Collect what you can and we will then create our coffee filter craft, alongside the other butterfly crafts.
Head out on a nature walk with kids and try to collect the following nature items to make your butterflies….
Materials
- Sticks and twigs in all sizes
- Petals
- Leaves in all shapes and sizes (and even colours if it’s Autumn), and
- Berries or other small nature items
How to make your coffee filter craft and butterfly craft nature pictures
Use petals, leaves, grass or any other nature items to set up a nature scene! We used petals to create our butterfly’s wings but you could use Autumn leaves or any plants. Play around with positioning your nature items to make a fun story – your butterfly could be flying away or even be a plane for a fairy! This is a great way of boosting a child’s creativity and encouraging their imagination! And if you love butterflies – you’ll love our Flower Crafts for kids too.
Make a Leaf Butterfly
For this activity, you need a few different items:
Materials
- Sticks,
- Chalk Pens, and
- Leaves.
Instructions
This is an easy craft for young kids to make with leaves and sticks.
Choose leaves that can make the shape of butterfly wings.
Decorate your leaves with crayons or chalks or chalk pens. A butterfly’s wings is one of the most beautiful parts of a butterfly and it is fun to find all the different types of butterflies we have in the world using books or the internet.
Kids can copy the patterns from a real butterfly or create their own unique designs! We used chalk sticks to decorate our leaves with pretty patterns.
Once you’re happy with how your patterns look – stick them down as wings with twigs for their bodies. Here are some more fun leaf crafts for kids.
How to make a coffee filter stick butterfly
Before you start, make sure that you gather what you need for this activity.
Materials
- Coffee filters,
- Felt pens,
- Pipettes, and
- Twigs.
Instructions
This nature craft is also a great colour science experiment. Kids of all ages will love to experiment with the changing colours and mixing the colours to make new ones!
Start by collecting twigs that would be a perfect size for your butterfly.
Next, take some coffee paper filters and colour them in with felt pens. You don’t need to colour them in fully – leaving some white space is a good idea.
You can experiment with different patterns and colours. You can even create your own colours by mixing!
Once you’ve coloured your coffee filters – take the pipettes and drop small droplets of water onto the filters. Kids will love to watch the swirling colours mix and change. Once you’re happy with your colour selection, leave the filters to dry and then cut out butterfly wing shapes from your filters.
Position them with your twig or stick as the butterfly body and glue them in place.
And there you have it! A beautiful stick butterfly!
We hope you have fun making your coffee filter craft nature butterflies and hopefully even chasing some real butterflies too!
If you want a few more ideas of things to do with the kids, do sign up to our weekly newsletter. We cannot guarantee you WILL have Time to Pee, but you might have a bit more chance too…. 😂
We have many more nature activities on the site, so before you go do take a look.
Here are even more great resources from around the web for you to try out as well.
Forest School Archives - Red Ted Art - Make crafting with kids easy & fun
How to use a nature journal with children
Play the Forest School Way
Come back soon,
Helen
Jemma Goulds
Jemma writes www.thimbleandtwig.com, an outdoorsy website that focuses on family adventures and getting kids outdoors and exploring. Jemma is mum to 4 crazy, wild kids and a teacher to many. She loves to write about muddy adventures, nature crafts and getting kids off screens and outside.
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