Paper Plate Mini Beasts – Ladybirds, Bees and Snails

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My toddler is obsessed with Mini Beasts. She gets so excited each time she spots a bumble bee or a ladybird, a little too excited at times and a few poor ladybirds have met an untimely end!
Paper Plate Mini Beasts Bees Ladybirds Snails
She doesn’t love all mini-beasts though, she’s not that keen on flies or spiders, as she thinks they’re “Going to get me!”  But I’m pretty sure that they are for more scared of her than she should be of them.
And for some reason she gets hysterical when she sees Hoverflies. I think they’re quite an attractive bug as bugs go, I think it must be something about the way they just hover in the air that unnerves her.

Mini Beasts – Paper Plate Ladybirds

We painted a quarter of the paper plate black and the rest of the paper plate red.
Whilst this dried we made the spots out of black pipe cleaners.
We did this by rolling them up into spiral shapes to form black circles.

Painting a Ladybird onto a paper plate
Once all of the paint was dry, we attached one black pipe cleaner down the centre of the plate and then we attached the spots. We used double sided sticky tape to attach the pipe cleaners. We always struggle to get the pipe cleaners to stay stuck down using glue, double sided sticky tape works so much better for this.
We then finished off the picture using another pipe cleaner for the antennae and of course our favourite googly eyes.
Paper Plate Ladybird

Mini Beasts – Paper Plate Bees

We painted yellow and black stripes over the whole of the paper plate.
We then used black pipe cleaners for the antennae and a large googly eye to finish it off.
Paper Plate Bumble Bee

How to make Snails using paper plates

We drew black spirals onto the paper plates with a wax crayon.
I mixed up some silvery grey paint with water and the kids brushed this over the black spiral. Wax resists waster, so it creates a really cool effect and made it look much more snail-like.
The snails head was cut out of another paper plate and was painted in the same watery silvery grey paint and a googly eye was added.Paper Plate Snails
My toddler wasn’t quite up to following these instructions to the letter, but she gave it a good go with a little help along the way.
Try not to get too hung up over your kid’s  and crafts turning out perfectly as that isn’t the point. The main thing is they are having fun and just see where it takes them.

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