We love dioramas! It’s a wonderful opportunity for little’s imaginations to run wild and create a whole new world. In this diorama, we created an underwater scene with sea creatures and underwater plant life using a shoe box as our blank slate. You can give your little ones a blank slate, like a shoe box, along with a few craft supplies and verbal prompts, and see what they come up with! It doesn’t have to be perfect, the important thing is little ones are getting in some tactile learning and either using their imagination or what they know about different environments. Here are some details on how we made our underwater diorama.
What You Need
- Shoe box, or any kind of box
- Tape
- Thread
- Construction paper
- Scissors
For decorations:
- Pipe cleaner
- Underwater itesm: Stones, sand, seashells
- Pom moms
Steps
We fit, cut and glued a paper background for the water and sand. You can also use paints and paint a background. Just let it dry before moving on!
We made some coral mounds to create some depth to our scene out of construction paper. To do this, fold the bottom 1/4”of the mound to make a spot to glue it into your box in different places.
We made some other underwater plant life by cutting out different plant shapes from construction paper and decorating them with markers.
We also made some neat underwater plant life by folding pipe cleaners to look like coral.
Pom poms make great underwater items too! We glued on some smaller pom poms to a big pom pom so it looked like colorful coral pieces.
For our underwater diorama we made some colorful fish. Using markers, draw and cut out your fish shape and add some googly eyes. You can cut out the shape of any underwater animal you like! Just make sure you decorate your animal on both sides – once they are hung up they can spin around. Add some googly eyes.
Tape a piece of thread to the top of your animal to hang from the top of the box.
Put it all together! It’s easiest to work from the back of the box to the front. We glued our underwater plants to the front and the back of the coral mounds to keep them in place. Then glue on any other items you have to the bottom, like seashells or sand.
Finally, hang your underwater animals by taping the thread to the top of the box.
Time to explore, let’s dive in and go on an underwater adventure! Glub glub! This is a great activity for an underwater theme, explore sea creatures, or to learn about different environments where animals live. You can make all kinds of dioramas! Try making one for a desert environment, or a jungle. Though we admit…underwater dioramas are our favorite. There is just so much to explore underwater! Have fun, everyone!
Watch Caitie make this craft in Caitie’s Classroom – Underwater Animal Adventure!
For lots more underwater animal activities and craft, check out our sea creatures themed page.
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook!
Contributor
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!
Original content © 2020 Super Simple. Not to be reprinted without express written permission. Terms of Service.
