Diwali Lantern Crafts for Kids

Diwali is known as the Festival of Light, and it’s all about light overcoming darkness, so it makes sense that lanterns would be a big part of the celebration. There are lots of fun ways to make lanterns at home or in the classroom to celebrate, so let’s look at some Diwali lantern craft ideas that you can of course use any other time of the year as well.

This cute lantern from The Joy of Sharing was the one that got me started thinking about diy lantern crafts. It’s made with tracing paper and Popsicle sticks, and little ones can at least help with the coloring if not putting it all together.

The paper lantern at Artsy Craftsy Mom involves cutting windows out of card stock that are then decorated with tissue paper and stickers. Adults can do the cutting while kids of any age can help decorate. A printable template is included to help you with the cutting. She also has a cute classic paper lantern made with glitter paper for extra fun.

Likewise with this one that uses cardboard as the frame from The Crafty Angels. You can cut out the pieces and let kids decorate with yarn, beads or anything else on a string that they might want to add.

For older kids I found a few videos of different kinds of lanterns that are really cool but might take more patience and dexterity than our little ones have. The Kandil lamp from Craft Nifty Creations (the one with the blue flowers shown above) is mostly a lot of gluing. Punekar Sneha has one made with lots of paper loops, which little kids could help with ones the strips are cut. And this gorgeous origami lamp from Being Artsy starts with a piece of posterboard that’s cut and folded to lovely result.

My Cool World Arts and Activities on Teachers Pay Teachers has a printable Diwali lantern kids can color and then make into a lantern. These would be lovely as classroom decorations.

Also be sure to check out some Diwali printables, coloring pages and a cute book about Diwali.

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

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