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I have decided to create a felt animal for my son for every letter of the alphabet in a new series: ABC Animals in Felt!  {This series will be going at a tortoise’s pace — haha — it will take at least the next year to complete all of them!}

This week has been devoted to letter T, so I gave my son the choice between a tiger or a turtle, and he chose a sweet turtle!  I am so happy about this, since the turtle was fairly simple to make.

All you need to make a Felt Turtle is:

• felt: dark green, light green, dark brown, light brown (or you can use paper!)
• two black buttons
• cotton balls
• hot glue gun (or Elmer’s if you’re just using paper)
• amazing Fiskar scissors (if you’re going to work with felt at all, you have to check these scissors out!)

** This craft uses a hot glue gun — please keep out of the reach of children — these are for adult use only!!

This is the only way this makes sense to me.  I cut the free printable (found below) into pieces.Assemble all of your felt pieces. Create your turtle’s shell by placing the light brown on top of the dark brown and hot glue it.
Then glue your light green head and arms and legs and tail onto the dark green circle.  Now add your cotton balls and carefully hot glue your shell on top!  We needed two heads because just one was a bit floppy.This Mr. Turtle has been chomping things all over the house.  My son had to add a mouth, so we put a little strip of brown felt under his head.

John helped me through the whole process and was so excited while watching the turtle come together.  It was his idea to make buttons for eyes!

All of these projects can be made with colored paper, so don’t let the “felt” aspect overwhelm you!  This would be just as fun to have your child make their own turtle with Elmer’s glue and paper.  I made a template for you to make your own turtle, along with a coloring page as a free printable!

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You can download the Turtle printable here!

Book Extension

If you’re looking for a wonderful book to read with this activity, check out Tadeo Turtle by Janis Cox. Janis has more Turtle activity ideas that you can find on her site.  This book teaches how Tadeo the turtle accepts how God created him and includes a lot of fun vocabulary!

During this process, I managed to get some hot glue on one of my favorite t-shirts : (  I googled how to fix it and came up from this great suggestion from Ask the Crafter!

This sweet turtle picture is from Creative Commons.

More in my ABC Felt Animal Series:

U is for Umbrella Bird

V is for Viper

 W is for Whale

X is for X-Ray Fish

Y is for Yak

Z is for Zebra