💡Skill: Imagining animals helps build children’s creative thinking and problem solving skills. Doing art projects builds the small muscles in their wrists, hands, and fingers.

Description

Real life animals can do amazing things. Work with your child to imagine superpowers for his or her own imaginary animal and then create a drawing or illustrated story about it. 

Materials

☑ Printable coloring sheets (optional)

☑ Printable puppets (optional)

☑ Paper

☑ Crayons/markers

Steps

Here’s how to explain this activity to your child:

• Real animals can do incredible things! Giraffes can clean their ears with their tongues. Sea otters hold hands when they sleep so they don’t float apart. 

• Let’s make up our own super animal and imagine its amazing powers. Can it glow in the dark? Can it fly? Can it eat only chocolate chip cookies?

• Let’s draw a picture of our imaginary animal and write some words about it.

Extend the Learning 

Meet Shine’s tiger friend, Rainbow. This tiger is a colorful example of how kids can use their imaginations to transform real animals into imaginary ones! Then create puppets by simply cutting the printable and gluing the top and side edges. Once dry, use to put on a puppet show! Print the coloring sheets and help kids draw their own unicorn.

Words to Use 

• Creative – From someone’s imagination

• Creature – An Animal 

• Imaginary – Not real

• Incredible – Very exciting

• Sea Otter – An animal that lives in the water and likes to float on its back

Pro Tip

If your little artist wants, help him or her put paper together to make a book about the imaginary animal. If your child needs help, start with a real animal, like a dog, and add some fun features like wings or the ability to speak!