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DIY Paper Plate Panda Bear
Pandas are a gift for early-years crafting: two colours, round shapes, and a face that still looks like a panda even when every piece is slightly crooked. That forgiveness matters. A craft a two-year-old can genuinely succeed at is worth ten that only look right when an adult finishes them.
This version uses a paper plate as the base, which gives small hands something sturdy to hold on to and stops the whole thing buckling under a generous amount of glue.
If the finished craft looks like an adult made it, the child probably did not make it. Let the ears go on wonky.
What you need
- One white paper plate per child
- Black card or black sugar paper
- A glue stick, or PVA glue with a brush for younger children
- Child-safe scissors, plus adult scissors for the trickier cuts
- A black marker, and optionally two wobbly eyes
How to make it
1. Cut the shapes. From the black paper you need two circles for ears, two larger ovals for the eye patches, and one small oval for the nose. An adult can cut these in advance for toddlers; pre-schoolers can have a go at cutting along a drawn line themselves.
2. Glue the ears. Two black circles at the top of the plate, roughly at ten and two o'clock. Let your child decide where - a panda with high ears is still a panda.
3. Add the eye patches. Stick the two ovals on at a slight angle so they slope inwards. This is the step that makes it read as a panda rather than a bear.
4. Give it eyes. A wobbly eye pressed into the middle of each patch, or a bold white dot drawn on with paint.
5. Finish the face. Glue the small oval nose in the centre, then draw a short line down from the nose and a curved smile underneath.
Ways to stretch it
Older pre-schoolers can add a paper-strip body and arms so the panda stands up, or cut thin green strips of bamboo to glue into its paws. Punch a hole at the top and thread ribbon through and you have a door hanger. Make several and you have puppets for a story about a panda who cannot find his breakfast.
The learning underneath
Cutting, tearing and gluing strengthen the small muscles in the hand and build hand-eye coordination. Positioning the ears and patches involves real spatial reasoning - above, below, next to. And the conversation while you work, about where pandas live and what they eat, quietly feeds vocabulary and understanding of the world, two of the areas we track in the EYFS framework.
At Little Regent Nursery we build crafts like this into weekly themes, so a panda morning might sit alongside a story, a song and a hunt for animal pictures in the classroom library. If you would like to see how our Playful Pandas and Sparkly Swans spend their day, book a visit with us.
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