Animal Diorama

I found these cute little plastic animals at The Dollar Store recently.  I've been wanting to get Olive some play animals like this and at $1 a piece, these sturdy, realistic animals were just the ticket!

Aren't they cute?  You may find the giraffe familiar - it was same one I used for the animal bookends I made in my last post.  I bought two of them.

The only problem is that they looked a little lonely.  I thought that they could use a habitat to live in, but being short on funds I needed to make one using things around the house.  Here's what I came up with:

I used a diaper box and cut off the top and one of the sides.  You can't see it, but I covered the outside with construction paper.  This isn't necessary, but Olive is obsessed with pointing at the baby pictures on the box and I didn't want that to overtake this activity.  For the floor, I used a piece of green felt and made little hills by stuffing some batting underneath.  The sky and clouds are painted with tempera paint.  I made 2 moveable trees out of toilet paper rolls and felt pieces.  I also made a little cave/hollowed out log out of 2 toilet paper rolls cut and glued together.  The whole thing took about 20 minutes to make and I had everything already on hand.

Yes, I know that it looks like a 4th grader made it for a school project, but my daughter loves it.  If she were older, I may have spent more time on it and made it "better looking".  Or maybe not, I don't know.  All I know is that it engages my daughter and it was $6 (the cost of the animals) well spent.  I have plans to make other habitats for the animals using more diaper boxes.  I'm hoping that we won't have too many diaper boxes before too long because we're trying to potty train my daughter.  So I better start holding on to them!