Paper Plate Crabs

Since we saw so many crabs at the beginning of our unit on our first trip rockpooling, Squirrel has enjoyed pointing out any crab he sees in our story books, playing with a small crab toy (and his lobster, he never refers to it as a crab, it is certainly an ‘ob-hah’, but he does like to involve him, bless!) and holding our crab flash card, signing and saying “cah-b!”

So a crab themed activity would go down well with kiddo, yes?
Ah, thats right. Craft protest. I remember now. Well, I got a little bit out of him, anyway. I injected a bit more ‘learnylearny’ into it, as that seems to be his thing right now, and we sort of wrapped it all up together over two days.

We used:
A paper plate.
A red dabber/dotter.
PVA glue.
Red tissue paper.
Orange sugar paper.
Red pipe cleaners.
Googly eyes.

We loved tearing our paper, a deliciously destructive touch of fine motor development!

And dabbing at our plates! Then a little gluing and sticking with our torn paper.

Then, a few days later (due to distraction), we added a few more bits of paper a bit more red dabbing!
I then popped on some YouTube videos of various crabs doing various crabby things, gave him his flash card, lobster and crab, plus his velcro matching puzzle from our theme unit, while i glued the pipe cleaner legs in place and our covered plate in half.
You can see it setting under the mirror in the image above!

Once it was dry i added some googly eyes, and added him to our unit display wall! Admittedly, he is a very simple crab, but Squirrel loved showing Daddy his crab when he came home from work, and certainly identifies it as a crab himself, so that’s enough for me!

This activity is part of Unit 1. The Seaside and Rockpools.