We love paper plate crafting, there are so many things you can make from this one simple material. This month it’s our Kids Craft Stars challenge and our theme is paper plates. Since we craft with these often, I decided to do something a bit different and put several paper plates together to make this educational “my world” paper plate craft with the kids.
This craft idea helps children to understand their place in the world, from a local and global perspective. Sometimes my younger children have got confused – they know that we live in London, and we live in England – but how can we live in both places at the same time? This craft explains this and helps children to understand simply, and to reflect on all of the different places that are part of their wider world.
To make the craft, we used 5 paper plates and some additional paper. You can use more or less, depending how much detail and how many place layers you want to include.
Supplies you’ll need:
- Paper plates
- Plain paper
- Glue stick
- Stapler
- Crayons and markers
- Green tissue paper
- World atlas (optional, but handy to have around while making!)
To help the paper plates layer up, each in different sizes, we used two large paper plates and three small ones. We cut the edges away from one of the large paper plates and two of the small paper plates so that each one had a slightly smaller size than the previous one. When cutting these paper plates, we did leave the edge at the top to make it easier to staple them all together later – you can see the shape we used in the picture below.
Next, get the kids to order the paper plates from largest to smallest and working from largest down, start decorating each one.
We used, from largest to smallest:
Planet: Earth
Continent: Europe
Country: England
City: London
Borough: Hillingdon
And then a picture of our house with house number. You can also include street name here.
Depending on where you’re from, you might want to adjust these to include county or state instead of a borough – just add extra paper plates as required.
Once you know which plate is going to represent which place, label each one of them along the outer rim of the paper plate, and then you can decorate each one.
Paper plate Earth
We coloured this blue and then stuck on bits of green tissue paper to make a simple Earth design
Paper plate continent: Europe
We used our children’s atlas to copy the shape of the continent of Europe. It doesn’t matter too much if it’s accurate – our’s wasn’t, it was drawn by a 5 year old so I really wasn’t expecting it to be exact! But it’s fun to use an atlas or world map and translate what they see into a project like this.
Paper Plate Country
We chose to draw the British flag and stick this down for our country plate. You could also use a picture of something that represents your country, whatever the kids choose.
Paper Plate City
There are lots of things you could use to represent London: a red London bus, the London eye, Buckingham palace or any of the other famous landmarks, but Z chose to draw a city scape for our paper plate which also works well. With coloured paper plates, sometimes it’s easier to draw on plain paper and then cut and stick the pictures on.
Borough
There’s not a lot that you can draw for our local borough so we stuck to words for this! But if you have ideas for your local area – then get creative and add anything you like.
House and street
Since this is the top layer, we just used paper here, not a paper plate. Get the kids to draw a picture of their house and include the house number and street address on it if they like.
Here are all our paper plates:
Once they’re all done, layer them all together and staple together at the top.
Kids can use the finished craft to easily visualise their place in the world, and how everything fits together.
More world geography
You might also like these Map Printables to use with your kids.
More Paper Plate Crafts
Take a look at the paper plate craft ideas my Kids Craft Stars friends came up with for our paper plate challenge this month
Paper Plate Acorn from A Little Pinch of Perfect
Paper Plate Pac-man, Inky, & Clyde
Mix and Match Felt Paper Plate Faces
Anna Marikar, mum of four and seasoned blogger, has spent over a decade sharing her parenting journey and passion for kid-friendly crafts and free printables.
Her easy-to-follow craft ideas and practical parenting advice have transformed In The Playroom into a cherished resource for parents.
Awesome idea! Going to see if my son wants to make one (he loves geography!)