I empty my son's book bag every day from school. It is a necessity as you never know what you'll find in there. The school isn't big on giving you lots of notice for things. Like a letter on a Tuesday to say that Friday is dress up day. Yay! And worse than that, there's a theme. It is World Book week, so children have to come dressed as a character from their favourite book.
And what does my son want to get dressed up as? A penguin. This left me perplexed as I couldn't think of any books that he had that were about penguins. However, as he patiently explained, there were lots of penguins in books that he owned (he pulled one down called Our Zoo, which he hadn't read since he was 2, to illustrate his point). And a penguin is what he wants to be.
To make it a bit more fun, we made the costume together. Starting with the mask.
For this you will need:
- white paper or a white paper plate
- black card or black paper
- orange or yellow card
- glue
- elastic or string
- scissors
This also works well as a rainy day, more spur of the moment project. As you can crayon in white paper or card to do the same sort of thing.
It is also a versatile craft as you don't need to have black cardboard specifically, for example. You can build this on a white paper plate, and stick black paper on the plate. Or colour the plate black.
If you've got a printer, which unfortunately we don't, you can make this project a whole lot easier by downloading and printing this template from Engage Today.
I had some stiff black card, and used that. First we made a circle outline using a plate. Next, cut out about a quarter of the circle. This is where their mouth and nose will go.
To make the eye shape I used a scrap of A4 paper that had been left over in a printer. I get friends to donate these left over prints from their offices for use in drawing, making maps, and so forth. We drew the sort of figure eight shape for the eye area on the reverse, and cut it out.
Then you need to get the orange or yellow card, and cut out a diamond shape. This is folded in half and stuck above the quarter shape you cut out earlier. This becomes the beak.
Finally, stick on the elastic. Although it is preferable to use elastic, I couldn't find mine. So we made do with some wool instead. This worked out OK as it sat over the top of his ears.
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