Our summer gallery wall is growing. It’ll still be summer for a few more months, so we are getting our money’s worth out of these crafts. The girls got a special treat this summer and went with their grandparents to visit their aunt in Florida! This was their second encounter with the ocean, and it went over much better this go around. Beach theme and sea animal craft ideas are all over the internet, but it wasn’t until this past week that I figured out how I could incorporate some into our gallery wall.
We did this craft in two stages, mostly to spread out the art time to fill up two days. First we made the ocean scene, then we made the sea creatures.
Ocean Scene :
- 1 Blue Poster Board
- ~ 5 sheets of Sand Paper
- 1\4 sheet of Green Tissue Paper
- Glue Stick
- Scissors
I first cut a blue poster board in half, then went along the top cutting peaks that would be our “waves”. I glued these together so we had one long strip of blue “water”.
For the sand, I cut my sandpaper into about 2″ strips, then cut a wave patter on the top. Evangeline covered the back of the strips with glue and Felicity stuck them down, running the full length of the bottom.
The “sea weed” are strips of green tissue paper cut in a wavy pattern, then glued into place.
Sea Creatures :
- Small Paper Plates
- Scissors
- Paint \ Crayons
- Tissue Paper (Optional)
There are thousands of ideas to make sea creatures out of paper plates, construction paper, toilet paper rolls anything you can imagine. I decided to do ours this way because I could cut the shapes out ahead of time and bring them out ready to be colored. Besides the crab shape, we didn’t have to add anything on to the paper plate. It was more of a one step craft for the girls. Sometimes that’s nice.
I cut jelly fish, fish, star fish and crab shapes out of my small paper plates. For the crabs, I cut the claws out of scrap paper plate edges and used a dot of glue to attach them. I tried to make an octopus, but I just couldn’t quite make it work.
Evangeline (age 3) used makers and Felicity (age 2) used crayons to color the fish, star fish and crabs. For the jelly fish, I tore up pieces of blue, purple and pink tissue paper and the girls stuck them on using a glue stick. They just as easily could have colored them, but this was a little more fun.
* I thought I had googley eyes in our craft box, but I didn’t. I may come back and add some on later because how fun are those? For the time being, I just colored black circle eyes. I saw an idea to use tin foil on the fish to look like scales. I came close to doing it, but at the last minute opted not to for no real reason at all. I still think that would look really neat.
Since the sea creatures are small paper plates, I was able to just run a glue stick along the backs of each and stick them on the poster board. Voila!
Evangeline is having so much fun with this beach scene up on the wall. She goes under it and plays like she’s at the beach; she runs in front of it jumping over the waves. I think someone really misses the beach! I’m glad this craft is helping her hold on to the vacation dream a little longer.
Summer is so long and our wall is getting smaller. I still want to make letters to spell out “summer” but haven’t decided how to do it yet. Other than that, I’m tapped out for summer craft ideas. I’m not sure what we’re going to do until October.
Being the Carruths 