This is a great craft because it's more than just a whale! It's somewhere to keep tiny treasures, or pieces for simple games you can play with your little ones.
You will need:
An egg carton
Cereal box card
Craft glue
Scissors
Paint
Black marker pen
Plain paper
Nail scissors (*to be used by an adult)
1. The first thing you need to do is paint your egg carton. We used ordinary ready-mixed poster paints. Add some white paint to the blue as this helps cover up any print and pictures on the box.
Paint some spare cereal box card blue too, for the tail and fins. We painted the bottom half of the egg carton a lighter blue, but it doesn't look very different in the pictures!
2. You could cut the tail out freehand, but we decided to make a template - fold a piece of thin card or paper and draw half a tail on the fold, then open up. Make it long enough so there's plenty of card to glue inside the egg carton. We cut a triangle shape template for the fins.
3. For the mouth, carefully run a brush with some black paint along the bottom edge at the head end (see photo below) Take it around both corners of the carton so you get a nice wide smile. When the paint is dry use a black pen to finish off, lifting the corners of the mouth, so there's a happy grin. Add eyes too or use googly eyes if you prefer.
4. Glue one fin just under the front edge of the lid, near the eye, and at the back, snip along the cardboard hinge join, just enough so you can slot in the second fin.
5. For the water spray, take a piece of plain paper, about 8cm wide and 16cm long, and roll it into a tube. Don't make it too tight - you want to be able to get the arm of your scissors inside the tube. Dab a little glue on the end corner or edge of the paper, to hold the tube together. Then cut about halfway down the tube, at roughly even spaced intervals, and all the way around.
6. Find a strand of paper right in the middle of the tube and give it a gentle tug, to pull it up a little. Don't pull too hard though, as you don't want the inside to pop out completely. (This part reminds me of making palm trees from newspaper tubes, do you ever remember doing that?) Splay out the paper strands a little by pressing down lightly with your hand. This makes it look a bit more splashy!
7. Use something like nail scissors* to make a hole for the spray on top of your whale. (Keep the scissors closed, press down and twist from side to side) Then cut a cross that's a little bigger than the width of your paper tube, and push through the card with your finger. Brush a little glue in the hole and push the spray into it.
8. If you'd like to make some waves, squirt some blue, green and white paint onto a plate or palette and use a big brush to mix and swirl the colours together - this is great fun and looks really effective.
Cut some wavy lines and fold each piece roughly in half to prop them up.
There are all kinds of things you could put inside your whale. We made some little pine cone fish and painted them lots of bright colours. You could use them to help your little ones learn colours, or help with counting.
