Crafts to Make with Paper Bags

April 24, 2026 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

There are so many fun crafts you can make with paper bags, which is a good thing because paper lunch bags come in a huge pack so if you’re not using them for lunches you’ll hang onto them forever (ask me how I know). Check out these fun crafts to make with paper bags.

Of course there are tons of options when it comes to making paper bag puppets out of lunch sized paper bags. Kids will have fun designing their own if you give them construction paper, markers, feathers, googly eyes, etc., but you can also make particular animals if you like.

To name just a few:

Dragon (Moms and Crafters) includes a free template
Octopus (Kids Activities Blog) also uses newspaper for bonus upcycling
Cow (Simple Everyday Mom) includes a free template
Sea otter (Buggy and Buddy) includes a free template
Squirrel (Crafts by Amanda) includes a free template
Butterfly (I Heart Crafty Things) you could use coffee filters if you don’t have doilies for the wings
Turkey (Journey to SAHM) a classic
Owl (Kids Activity Zone)
Platypus (Tina’s Dynamic Homeschool+) this post includes other Australian animal crafts and picture books to read if you’re doing an Australia unit

I also have a small paper bag journal over on my blog that kids and adults alike can use. These are fun to make for treasure hunts or use as a travel journal for your next vacation since the pockets can hold little treasures.

Use a bigger bag to make a pretend play satchel and treasure map like this one from Buggy and Buddy. That would be another fun way to do a treasure hunt in the house or yard, or let the kids draw their own maps as they explore.

And if your kiddo is always bringing you flowers from the yard, you can make a paper bag display to hold plain glass or mason jar vases like this one from Cleverly Inspired. Hers has a red, white and blue theme but kids could decorate them in all sorts of ways.

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Make Unpoppable Bubbles You Can Play with Inside

If it’s hot where you live, you might be looking for some fun activities you can do with kids inside the house. And while bubbles are generally a strictly outside the house kid of activity, these special bubbles are ones you can play with inside. It’s both a lot of fun and a science lesson.

These bubbles aren’t blown into the air, you blow them onto a tabletop gently through a straw.

What’s really cool about them is that they will stay on the table top without popping. You can even blow another bubble inside the first bubble, or stack bubbles on top of each other.

Why does this work? It’s thanks to a special ingredient in the bubble solution: sugar.

This particular recipe is from Play Party Game, but I’m sure you can find it other places with similar ingredients as well. But this post has a good explanation for what is normally happening with regular bubble solution made mostly with just soap and water, as well as why the sugar helps to make bubbles stronger and helps them last longer.

You could make this into a full on science experiment for your kids, comparing regular bubbles (this time you’ll want to do it outside or somewhere easy to clean) to the “unbreakable” bubbles, letting them hypothesize about what ingredients might help make bubbles stronger or what the sugar does to the solution.

You can talk about the molecular structure of the bubble being altered by the sugar, which makes it stronger and longer lasting.

They even have an activity kit you can buy to help guide your explorations and that offers extension activities for you to try.

Or you could just play with them. No judgement here; it’s summertime.

Grab the recipe and more of the science behind the bubbles from Play Party Game. And while you’re playing with bubbles you can also check out my giant bubble solution recipe over at Our Daily Craft.

[Photo: Play Party Game]

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