Paper Plate Elephant in 5 Easy Steps

We are working our way through the alphabet, in animals! Can we do it? Is there an animal for every letter of the alphabet? We'll find out!

Big E , little e, what begins with E???

ELEPHANT! 🐘

We used 8" paper plates for our elephant's ears and a 10" plate for his face. This made a very large elephant!!! He's so cute though! Reminds me of Horton!

Step 1

The first thing we did was make his trunk. We used a paper towel roll and cut it at the half way mark leaving the top uncut so it would bend into a "V" shape. Then we used a toilet paper roll to cut a piece, at an angle on one side, and a curve on the other, to fill in the gap at the bottom of the "V". Then hot glued it together.

You could use toilet paper rolls for all the pieces to make a smaller trunk or cut down your paper towel roll a bit if you want to create a more petite elephant using smaller paper plates. Because our trunk was so large, we went with larger paper plates to create better proportional balance.

Step 2

Cut the ears in an elephant ear shape. Use the side of the plate that's been cut off to create the husks. Our plates had a deep ridge which added some dimension to our husks. This is pretty serious art, here.

Step 3

Paint your plates, I mean, elephant's face and ears. Don't forget his husks and trunk! My girl loves to paint. Me? It's a love hate relationship. Those precious quite moments while she's fully engaged are worth the clean up... I think... I really need to switch the buying the large bottles of our favorite Crayola paint. It would save us money in the long run! But for now, we love mixing and matching the small sets. Can't go wrong with the Classic colors, but Glitter is the biggest hit in our house with NEON coming in close behind! I usually just use an egg container for the paint since she loves to mix them all together, but these are cool too! I like to buy these cheapy big bristle brushes.

Step 4

Once everything is dried, start your glue guns! I have a mini, that I like for quick, smaller projects and my girl is learning to use it. It fits well in her hand. Apparently, you can also get a low-temp glue gun that's safer for littles. Glue all your elephant pieces in place and voila....wait. EYEBALLS!

Step 5

Cut your elephant's eyeballs out! Large white ovals and proportional black rounds will create the cutest dang eyeballs you've ever seen, especially if you let your kid cut and paste them all on their own! 🤣 NOW....VOILA, TA-DA!!! You've done it!

Big E, little e, what begins with E????

E is for Elephant. Eh, eh, Elephant! 🐘

We use Gorilla Mounting Putty to hang all of our alphabet animals on the wall! It works great and doesn't damage the wall. I cut the letters out of our diaper boxes! 🤣 We color or paint or dot marker or dot sticker or sticker or all of the above the letter we are working on out of our dot alphabet book. This white board is seriously awesome! It doubles as a magnet board so, MAGNA-TILES, our magnetic alphabet and numbers and this cool magnetic set are all different ways we can use it! Not to mention just free drawing, the WILLLLDEST things get created on this board! 🤣 I love to set up an activity for my 3 year old to do on it while I am making breakfast. Plus, the wooden frame makes it pretty. 🙌

Until next time...

Let's do this thing together. 💚

Did you make an elephant? Are you going to? Do you have another fun elephant project? Share with us! Give this post a heart, would ya?! Let us know how the project turned out for you! Post a picture!!!

*This post contains affiliate links. #9 July, 14 2025