Crafting with Kids: Making Turtles with Egg Cartons

Egg cartons are a great crafty material. We love using them to mix paints, and a couple of months ago we decided to make one of our favorite animals: turtles. This is a super easy, super cute little craft made from egg cartons, tissue paper, googly eyes, feathers, and paint. We cut up the egg carton so each cup was an individual piece, then decorated the outside with tissue paper, paints, and feathers. Then I took scraps of cardboard that I had saved from a shipping box, traced around the lid of the egg carton, added a head and tail, and then cut out the cardboard and stapled it to the corners of the cup. Then we painted the cardboard and glued on some googly eyes.

A great book to pair this activity with is Turtles in My Sandbox by Jennifer Keats Curtis. It's a sweet story about a pregnant turtle that mistakenly lays her eggs in a little girl's sandbox instead of on the beach. The little girl and her mother end up helping the turtles as they grow to full size and then release them into the wild. After reading the book, my girls ended up putting the turtles they made into a "tank" (empty shoebox) and fed them tiny pieces of newspaper and paperclips.