India crafts: Paper plate elephant

Time for some animal crafts!  We're venturing into the Indian jungle to make an elephant, a tiger and a peacock puppet out of paper plates, inspired by posts on Activity Village.  We tried to do all of them on a rainy morning, which I wouldn't really recommend.  The Whirl Girl loves her projects and even by the end of it, she was sick of them and ready to just play.  But individually, they shouldn't be too much work. 

First up, an elephant.  You can tell that she's Indian because she's all decorate like elephants in India often are.  Like this one (photo from National Geographic):

 

Supplies:

• paper plate (we used a small one)
• gray (or black and white) paint
• gray paper
• wooden chopstick or something similar
• glue-on eyes or black paper
• decorations (optional)

 Step One: Paint the plate gray.  

Step Two: Add decorations.  We cut out paper and ribbons that I had. 

Step Three: Glue on trunk and eyes. 

Step Four: Glue on ears.  The Whirl Girl decided these needed some decoration too, this time with crayons.

Step Five: Attach chopstick to the back to make it a puppet.

 Introduce to other Indian jungle friends.