Octopus Craft

I mentioned in last week’s N is for Night Sky post that we are making an ABC book as a way to remember some of our activities this year. When possible I try to coordinate the letter craft with our theme for the week.

For O we are learning about opposites. I found the book Octopus Opposites at our library. We enjoyed the way some of the opposite pairs in this book were presented. After seeing “Sea Urchin Out” and “Sea Urchin In” we decided to look at a few pictures of real sea urchins to see if we could find some that were “out” and some that were “in.” “Pelican Full” and “Pelican Empty” showed a pelican’s beak full of food and then empty.

After reading the book we made this Octopus O Craft.

Before the activity I cut out a large O and two rectangles of paper. I made sure the rectangles would make pieces short enough to fit on our paper when we placed them on the bottom of the letter O. This is only important if you are planning to add them to a memory book like we are. Otherwise the size doesn’t matter, and you could have fun with long dangling arms.

On each rectangle I drew some wavy lines so that after cutting on the lines the kids would each end up with eight arms. I tried my best to make the wavy lines far enough apart so that the kids could add dot stickers later.

Both of the kids cut along the lines on their own. They love to cut, and it is great fine motor practice.

We also added a bit more fine motor practice by adding dot stickers to represent the suction cups on the eight arms. The kids made their own arrangements, but if you were working on patterning you could have kids create different patterns on each arm.

Next they glued the arms onto the letter O. I didn’t give them much direction, so it was interesting to see their choices. One child glued them to the back of the letter. The other child glued them to the front. When they noticed that it was different, I had to laugh as one of them said, “Hey! Front. Back. That’s opposites!”

To finish up the craft we glued the Octopus O to a blue sheet of paper. One child wanted to leave the octopus as it was, and the other child wanted a face. It is more important to me that the kids are happy with the process and the end product, so I let them both do it the way they wanted. They both look bright and beautiful hanging on our wall.