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Two colourful paper-craft birds on sticks are mounted onto a wooden platform. There are laminated paper signs on the cream wall behind them.
Two colourful paper-craft birds on sticks are mounted onto a wooden platform. There are laminated paper signs on the cream wall behind them.

Doorstep Explorers

Giant Paper Stuffed Birds

This activity is designed to explore working in a larger scale, creating large 3D stuffed birds out of paper.

The starting point will be to discover the species of birds that are local to them. Can they see any out the window? Can they identify them? What birds are are common in their local area?

This project is very flexible to the abilities of individuals. Some can create more general bird shapes, while those with more advanced abilities can look at the shape and proportion of the different birds, and base their designs on specific species.

Materials

  • plain paper and pencils / felt tips for initial drawings
  • brown parcel paper roll
  • selection of papers (recycled packaging, printed papers, old gift wrap, envelopes, flyers, magazines, anything you can find)
  • newspapers
  • glue sticks
  • marker pens
  • stapler and staples
  • garden canes or string to use to display

Instructions

1. Investigating birds!

Start the activity by talking about birds you might see out the window. Spend some time looking for them, noting what you see and trying to identify them. Have a list of birds you might expect to find, with pictures of them to help identification. You could even have recordings of the different bird songs.

Crafters can then start drawing some of the birds, ask them to pay attention to the different shapes and markings.

2. Create the body of the bird

Spread out a large sheet of parcel paper and ask them to draw the outline of the body of the bird as large as they can.

Cut out two of the bird shapes so you have a back and front. You can either double the paper and cut them both out together or cut one and use it as a template to draw around and cut the other onf out. You’ll need to leave about a 2cm edge around the bird shapes to staple at the end.

3. Decorate the birds

Decorate the front and back of the bird shapes using paper collage and pen. Feathers can be cut out, or paper can be roughly torn and layered. The birds can be based off a real bird that you identified earlier (correct colours and markings) or they can be bright and beautiful abstract designs. Depending on the concentration and skill levels of your crafters, individual feathers can be made with great detail on them, or they can be more simply decorated.

4. Assembling

Once both panels of the bird has been decorated, lay one on top of the other and carefully staple around the edges leaving a gap approximately 30cm wide at the bottom.

Ask your crafters to loosely tear and scrunch up old newspapers. Use these to stuff the paper birds, being gentle so as not to tear away any staples. Once stuffed, staple up the gap.

The birds can be hung from string or sticks can be pushed into them from beneath. Legs can be made from sticks, string or strips of paper.