Porcupine Painting for Kids
Practice fine motor skills while learning about orchard animals and safety rules with your preschoolers using this Porcupine Painting. This painting for kids activity is perfect for your next orchard preschool theme.
This week, we’ve been learning about Animals in the Orchard. We’ve talked about birds and bugs, raccoons, squirrels, and of course porcupines.
The little guy and baby girl are incredibly fascinated by porcupines. After all, check out their quills! Today’s discussion question was, “What do you see on a porcupine?”
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A huge thanks to Experience Early Learning (formerly Mother Goose Time) for providing us with their Experience Preschool curriculum for free in exchange for sharing our honest and authentic stories resulting from our personal experiences. It’s been such a huge blessing to us! As always, my opinions on awesome stuff for little kids are 100% my own.
We each gently touched the end of a toothpick and talked about how the toothpick was “pokey” just like the porcupine’s sharp quills, which protect it from predators.
A porcupine has sharp quills on its body to protect it from predators. A baby porcupine (porcupette) has soft quills. They are nocturnal and will sneak into orchards at night to look for food to eat.
Sometimes, the little guy and baby girl want to do the activities more than once and today’s Pokey Porcupine Puppet was a perfect example of that.
We did the Porcupine Make & Play earlier in the month using the supplies that were included in our curriculum kit and then again today using stuff from our STEAM bins.
Instead of coloring our porcupines using markers, we painted them with liquid tempera this time. Either way, we had lots of fun with this adorable paper plate porcupine craft.Porcupine Painting for Kids
What you’ll need
- Toothpicks
- Circle Shape
- Craft Stick
- Wiggle Eye
- Glue
- Tape
- Markers
Here’s how to do it
Discuss
- When might a porcupine feel scared? How is a porcupine dangerous?
Make
- Cut circle shape in half to create two porcupine bodies.
- Invite each child to decorate a porcupine body with the provided materials. Glue on the toothpicks as quills.
- Discuss safety rules for sharp objects, e.g., carry scissors with the point down, ask for help cutting food, etc.
Play
- Invite children to use the porcupine puppets to retell the safety rules for sharp objects.
Observe
- Which safety rules does the child recall and retell?
- Does she practice good safety habits during the art process?
This was such a versatile craft that we did two different ways this month. For our original porcupines, we used paper circles cut in half. This time around, we just folded paper plates.
Both of these techniques worked well and either could be used to make a quick and easy porcupine puppet craft that your preschool-aged learners are sure to love!
Don’t forget to check back if you’re interested in seeing what we’re up to next week with our Transportation theme from Experience Preschool!
