Paper Bag Activities for Kids

Here’s another one of those fun made up holidays: July 12 is Paper Bag Day for reasons unknown. But if your household is like mine, you probably have everything you need to celebrate this holiday every day. I think I bought a bag of paper lunch bags when my daughter was in preschool and we still have some (she’s about to turn 14!).

The first thing you probably think of to do with paper bags is to make puppets (we actually had a craft kit once that was all paper bag crafts, but you can design your own too). Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Handprint bird paper bag puppets: Our Kid Things
Paper bag people: Kids Activities Blog
Printable Grogu (Baby Yoda) puppet: Simple Everyday Mom
Paper bag bear puppets: Messy Little Monster
Paper bag turkeys: Made with Happy
It’s not quite a puppet, but the jellyfish from No Time for Flashcards is another fun option in a similar vein

Another thing I liked to do was to make little books out of paper bags. There are instructions at Kitchen Table Classroom for how to do it. You can cover the “pages” with scrapbook paper or construction paper and kids can draw, journal, collage or whatever they want, and the ends of the bags are still open so they can slide little things into them, too.

Paper bag kites are another fun and easy craft to make with kids, because they’re fun to decorate with paint, stickers, drawings or whatever the kid wants to do. Check out the instructions at Somewhat Simple.

Make a whole little town of paper bag houses and buildings with this cute idea from In the Bag Kids Crafts.

And if you’re looking for an activity that goes a little beyond crafts, this guess the scent activity is low prep and lots of fun. Check it out at Raising Lifelong Learners.

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.

Have you read?

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