Recycled Kids Craft // Dinosaur Forest

Last month I saw this cute little christmas forest over at Mama Finch and thought it would be a fun activity we could easily adapt to our family. I’ve been after a fun recycled kids craft, specifically one that uses toilet rolls as we have a KAZILLION of them, so this was perfect! My kids love dinosaurs, and so I thought we could make a bunch of different types of trees and make a dinosaur play scene out of it all. It worked really well, and is a fun easy craft to do with kids. Making and playing with this spanned the entire day (with lots of things in-between the steps) which was perfect to do on our home day.

To make this recycled dinosaur forest, you’ll need:

Toilet rolls
Scrap cardboard (old cereal boxes work a treat!)
Paint & painting equipment
Green paint
Scissors
Toy dinosaurs or other animals depending on how you want to adapt your forest.

How To Make It:

We got started by painting out big piece of cardboard with a few different green colours. I mostly just let them go for it and do whatever they wanted, but we did have a little talk about patterns we could make with our brushes or fingers. This would be a great opportunity to talk about patterns, and using other objects to help with painting.
Teacher Talk: Considering giving your child items other than brushes to paint with. These make great “brushes”: bubble wrap, the sides of thick cardboard, specific pattern making instruments, using real leaves to make prints.
Once our painted cardboard dried we cut out some slits in the tops of our toilet rolls, and cut out tree shapes. This time I was the one who cut out the tree shape, and asked the boys for their suggestions on what it should look like (“A tall one!” “One that looks like this tree (points to a tree in the garden)”, “A pointy tree!”. etc.). If your kids were older they could cut it themselves, and even if your kids are just learning to cut this is a great activity as they don’t need to be exact.
Tip: We cut out two of the same shape (I folded the painted cardboard over before I cut it) so that they could go back to back and we could use our trees from all directions. You could also paint the other side once they’re cut, but this would take a bit longer!
The boys helped put the leaves into the slits we’d made at the top of the toilet rolls, and viola, we have trees!
Lastly we made out scene using extra painted cardboard, and a bit of blue scrap fabric for the river. If your trees fall over then use some play dough (or blu tac if you don’t have play dough handy) to make them sturdy at the bottom. Enjoy!