Beautiful Bugs

Beautiful Bugs

This is an activity that you can do with your little ones. Plenty of easy instructions for eager creative hands. We are making some flying bugs! They are bright and beautiful, and really get your kids thinking about construction and the anatomy of bugs.

All you really need is some white card (paper could also work), a handful of pipecleaners, and some glue and scissors. I used watercolour paints to colour them, but you could use pens, pencils, depends how much mess you want to make.

I started with A3 card, this will allow you to make between 4 – 8 bugs. My daughter and I washed some paint all over it, pretty messy! and then splattered some dots on top of that. We are just trying to achieve some bright textures which will become the bug wings.

While the paint is drying, I used my pipecleaners to make bug bodies. I folded the pipecleaner down and formed a loop, leaving about 10cm. Look at some images of bugs, notice they bodies have separate heads and thoraxes? You can play around with different bug body shapes by twisting smaller loops into the piecleaner.

Once your cardboard is dry, fold it into long thin ‘hotdog’ shapes. The fold will help keep the front and back of the wing attached. So go ahead and cut pairs of wings out of the folded card, ensuring the wing remains attached at the fold.  Again, encourage your kids to look at pictures of bugs, the ways their wing shapes are different, some have two wings, others four.

The wings loop through the bug bodies and then get glued shut when in place. They still move around a little bit which makes them more fun to play with. 

I decorated some pot plants in my house with these. A good reminder of where our buggy friends live. But you might also like to try this hanging mobile which uses the excess pipecleaners to create a continuous chain of bugs. Cute!

Looking at nature when doing art projects is a great way for kids to learn also about science. There are many extension projects you can do such as collecting leaves and flowers in a found object walk, watching the lifecycle of a bug or caterpillar, looking at the seasons, growing seeds into veges.

We have a few other nature related ideas on the blog you might like to try – like our Pressed Flower Insects, or our Woolly Worms, or our Aussie Bird Booches.

We hope this project gets you and your little ones exploring your garden!

Until next week,

Tracy x