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.

Have you read?

Book Review: Once in a Blue Moon

Kids all seem to go through a phase of loving trivia, and if you’ve got kids who want to know about the tallest, biggest and weirdest things in nature, they’ll enjoy the book Once in a Blue Moon by Emily Hawkins.

The book explores wonders of astronomy, meteorology, big trees, weird animals, volcanoes and more to show off the rarest events and phenomena in the natural world.

Kids ages 7-10 will learn about the lake (Lake Hillier, on an island off Australia) that has water that’s bubblegum pink, the world’s deepst came (Veryovkina Cave in the country of Georgia) and the world’s biggest tree, a banyan in southeast India with a canopy that covers more than five acres!

Readers will learn what a blue moon is, how supernovas happen and about Haley’s comet and solar eclipses, among other space-related phenomena. Closer to home they’ll learn about stinky flowers, bleeding trees, glowing fungi and pizzly bears.

There’s content about times when it’s rained frogs (and when frogs have exploded en masse), when snow made giant snowballs all by itself and how clouds stack on themselves like pancakes. The book also explores ball lightning, sun dogs, St. Elmo’s fire and more.

I love books like this and I know kids do, too. There’s so much weird and wonderful about our world and even as adults we don’t know about all of these things. I found it fun to learn, for example, that there’s a volcano on the island of Java that not only sends out blue flames from vents near its crater, it’s also home to an acidic lake.

Illustrations by Vlad Stankovic illuminate these weird natural wonders and are sure to get kids interested in learning more about some of these remarkable animals, plants, rock formations and more.

About the book: 80 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Wide Eyed Editions. Suggested retail price $30.

Have you read?

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