If you love ocean animals and paper plate crafts then you will love our new craft ebook, Paper Plate Ocean Animals!

Included are 14 Ocean animal templates which transform the humble paper plate into some of your favourite sea creatures.

In our paper plate ocean animals ebook we explore some of the animals which call our oceans home, providing cool facts and information on each one as well as a template to create an eye-catching craft which can be hung on the wall.

You can get your copy of the ebook here.

I have loved learning about these incredible animals almost as much as I’ve enjoyed designing the crafts. Crafts are fun, but I’d love for kids to absorb just how important and unique each of the animals they are making is. This is why I’ve included some fascinating facts…

For example, did you know:

• Crabs breathe through gills (both in and OUT of the water)
• Male seahorses get pregnant and have babies
• A blue whale’s heart is the size of a small car
• Swordfish can swim as fast as a speeding car
• The temperature of the sand eggs are buried in determines whether baby sea turtles will be male or female
• A narwhal’s “unicorn horn” is actually a tooth protruding from it’s upper lip (sorry to burst your bubble on this one)
• Or my favourite fact of all, Killer Whale pods are usually lead by their oldest female in order to benefit from her lifetime of wisdom. If only humans could take a leaf from their book, right?

My hope is that Paper Plate Ocean Animals will help kids gain an appreciation of marine life, which sadly needs our protection. Many of these beautiful animals are endangered by human activities, pollution and global warming.

Age recommendation: The ebook is designed for kids 6+, but younger kids could also do the crafts with some help from a parent or teacher. You are never too young or old to learn about ocean animals!

File type: The ebook is a printable pdf file, but you will download a zip file containing both a USA and AUS/UK version (with differences in spelling, page size and units of measurement).

How to make a paper plate ocean animal

All of the info you need is contained in the ebook, but I have created a short tutorial video so you can see how it’s done. The technique is basically the same for all of the animals.

Change it to suit your needs and the materials you have on hand

We have used heavy coloured construction paper (card stock), but ordinary paper will also work. If you would rather print the templates directly onto the construction paper you can (instead of stapling the template on top of the paper as I have done), or if you have no construction paper you could print the templates onto plain white and hand colour them. Do whatever you like!

Making an ocean background

As an optional extra you might like to make an ocean collage background for your paper plate sea animals. I have created background collages by layering paper of different textures onto a background of solid colour.

Some materials you could use are:

• Newspaper – I’ve coloured mine using liquid watercolour
• Paper towel – mine has been scrunch dyed using liquid watercolour
• White torn paper towel for foamy waves
• Tiny fish cut out from coloured paper – I’ve used metallic paper but plain colour would work just as well
• Anything else you can think of such as: tissue paper, sand paper, paper printed on with bubble wrap, recycled artworks etc.