Swimming Underwater Animal Craft

Swimming Underwater Animal Craft

Swimming swimming swimming in the sea! You can make underwater animals swim in the sea with our underwater animal craft. This craft is super colorful, and lots of fun to play with. It’s a wonderful addition to an underwater unit, or just as a playful activity. You can make your favorite underwater animal, maybe a colorful fish, or an octopus! Maybe even Baby Shark! Do do do do do do do do! Let’s get started. 

Things you’ll need

Swimming Underwater Animal Craft
  • 2 paper plates 
  • Craft paint – blue and beige 
  • Construction paper 
  • Popsicle stick 
  • Glue stick 
  • Googly eyes 
  • Paint Brush
  • Scissors 
  • Craft knife (good scissors or a regular knife will work too) 
  • Bottle cap or something circular to trace – 2” to 2 1/2” 
  • Markers 

Steps

Swimming Underwater Animal Craft

First, paint your paper plates! For the water background, paint the top 3/4 of one of your  paper plates blue. On your other paper plate, paint the bottom 1/3 of the plate beige. This will be the sand at the bottom of the sea! Let both dry, and then cut out the sand portion of the second plate. 

Swimming Underwater Animal Craft

Place the sand plate on top of the water background plate and with a pencil, mark the edge of the sand line onto the water background plate and then remove the sand. This will be the mark for what the sand paper plate will cover so we can make the slit below it.  Then, with a craft knife (sharp scissors or any sharp knife will work) carefully cut a slit 1/2” below the line you marked. This will be where the popsicle stick will poke through.

Swimming Underwater Animal Craft

To make your fish, start by tracing a bottle cap (or anything circular) to make a circle onto a piece of construction paper. You can also make a turtle, octopus, jellyfish – any underwater animal you like. Make whatever shape fits your animal! Then decorate your animal with markers and googly eyes. We also cut out and glued on a fin for our fish, and make polka dots by dipping a pencil eraser into paint and using it as a stamp.

Swimming Underwater Animal Craft

Once your decorations are dry, cut out your animal and glue a popsicle stick to the back.

Swimming Underwater Animal Craft

You can decorate your underwater scene anyway you like. We made some underwater foliage, coral, and other aquatic life from construction paper and glued it into place, both on the water background plate and the sand plate. We also used a marker to make dots on the sand plate so it looks more like sand!

Swimming Underwater Animal Craft

Now add some glue from a glue stick around the back edges of the sand plate. Line the plate up with the water background plate and glue it on.

Swimming Underwater Animal Craft

Finally add your underwater animal through the slit you cut in in the blue paper plate. You can make your animal swim by moving the popsicle stick. Now your underwater animal is ready to swim swim swim in the sea!

Swimming Underwater Animal Craft

Watch Caitie make this craft in Caitie’s Classroom – Underwater Animal Adventure

Use this craft to play along with any of our Super Simple Songs about underwater animals.

Trying swimming and stopping with this craft along with the fun dance song Red Light, Green Light

For lots more underwater animal activities and crafts, check out our sea creatures themed page.

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Caitie's Classroom LogoContributor

This post accompanies a video from Caitie’s Classroom. Join Caitie in the classroom for kids songs, games, activities, stories, crafts, and much more! Catch up on past episodes and segments, follow Caitie on Facebook and Instagram, and subscribe to Super Simple Play so you never miss an episode. Don’t forget to ring the bell for notifications!


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