She's Crafty

Paper Plate Giraffe

Paper Plates are a staple at our house, not only for eating but also for creating. When Andy and Luke were 5 and 3, one of their favorite bedtime stories was Giraffes Can't Dance by Giles Andreae. I got it off their bookshelf the other night and as I dusted it off I reminisced for a moment of the sweet memories. Then I instantly thought, hey, this would be a fun book to make a giraffe craft with.  :)

Gerald was a tall giraffe whose neck was long and slim, but his knees were awfully bandy and his legs were rather thin. When the annual Jungle Dance comes around, all the animals perform their spectacular dances but when Gerald gets up all the animals laugh at him about his clumsiness and he walks off feeling sad that he can't dance. As he looks up at the moon a friendly cricket reminds him that everyone can dance once you find music that you love. Then as he finds his rhythm, all the other animals surround him in amazement and declare that he is the best dancer they have ever seen. This is a great read aloud story!


Our paper plate giraffe was so simple and fun to make.

1. Paint the bottom of a paper plate yellow and let it dry completely.

2. On a sheet of yellow paper (I used a different shade of yellow than what we painted the paper plate), draw two ears and a mouth. From the same sheet of paper I also cut a 1 1/4" strip for the horns and then cut the strip in half to make two horns.

3. Have your child cut out all the giraffe pieces, then glue them onto the giraffe.

4. Next we glued on some large wiggly eyes and some brown pom-poms for the brown hair at the top of the horns.

5. Draw a nose and mouth on your giraffe. We used pencil first and then traced it with black marker. It took Luke a couple trys to get his nose how he wanted it so I'm glad we did it this way.  :)

6. We used a circular sponge brush for Luke to dab the brown spots on his giraffe. Luke looked at the picture of Gerald in the book and saw that he had some brown at the bottoms of his ears, so he added that too.

Happy Crafting!!

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