Chinese New Year Dragons craft for toddlers

We made these dragons ahead of Chinese New Year – they are not the most accurate representation, but my two year old and I had fun making them! They are made out of an old egg carton, and can be adapted to any design or level of skill.

You need:

Cardboard egg box – a 12-egg box works best

Paints in various bright colours – or more traditional e.g. red

Stick-on eyes or a pen to draw on eyes

Coloured tissue paper (I used red, orange and yellow).

First paint the egg box carton and allow to dry. I found it easiest to give my daughter the whole 12-egg box to paint in one piece and cut it down the middle into two pieces when the paint was dry – it’s easier to hold on to. We painted it in a mixture of bright colours as you can see!

I left it to dry overnight then the next day cut up strips of tissue paper – you can let your child do this of course if they can use scissors – which we stuck on with PVA glue along the length of the body. I think I originally intended them to be flames coming out the mouth and a tail but my daughter wanted to stick them along the body. Finally we used some stick-on eyes and then played with our dragons flying them around.