Mini Beast Gardens craft

Our latest Bostik Bloggers craft box arrived in the middle of the Easter holidays, and carried the theme Minibeasts/Gardens. Usually when the box arrives I come up with some craft ideas to do with the children, but as this time they were here when it arrived I let them have a look through the materials and come up with their own craft ideas. Mia has fond memories of the fairy garden than we made a little while ago and so they decided that they'd like to go once again with the garden theme, and this time make gardens for mini beasts.

I found them each a box to form the basis of their gardens, and then pretty much let them get on with it themselves! I even managed to find Harry a box with a clear plastic lid so he could pretend it was a real mini beast home.

Here's how they made them.

You need:

A shallow cardboard box or lid
Green felt
Adhesive - we used Bostik Glu Dots and a Blu Tak Fine and Wide Glu Pen
Coloured pipecleaners
Artificial leaves and moss
Minibeast and flower stickers
Googly eyes

Instructions:

Cut the felt to fit the size of the box and place inside. If you want to you can stick it down, we used the Blu Tak Fine and Wide Glu Pen which we received in a previous Bostik Bloggers box, it's a brilliant, versatile glue.

Decorate your garden with flower stickers, artificial leaves and so on. Mia had great fun sticking everything down. We used Bostik Glu Dots to secure the artificial leaves which worked really well and held them firmly in place.

Then Mia again used the Blu Tak Fine and Wide Glu Pen to stick everything else down with, it's a great design which means that she can use it by herself and it doesn't make any mess. Harry was happy to leave his items loose so that he could move them around and play with them, but we used Blu Tack to secure some of them temporarily in place.

Harry wanted to make a caterpillar finger puppet for his garden. He used some felt cut out shapes and sewed around them for the body of the caterpillar, then we used the Bostik Glu Dots to stick on googly eyes and a button. The Glu Dots work really well on the felt and stuck it all down firmly and I think his caterpillar is lovely!

Then he finished off his garden with some pipe cleaner worms, insect stickers and artificial moss.

Mia decided that she wanted to make her minibeast garden portable, so she glued some ribbon onto the sides to make a handle (I stuck some tape over it as well to make sure that it was properly stuck down as she was too impatient to wait for the glue to dry!). Then they were finished!

This was a brilliant craft activity, not only did it occupy the children for ages while they were making their gardens, they then went on to play with them together for ages, and for days after too!

This box of craft materials was provided to me free of charge by Bostik as part of the Tots100/Bostik Craft Bloggers Club.