Dragon Crafts:

How To Decorate Paper Lanterns

See how dragon crafts come alive with our fun crafts for kids as we show you how to make a homeschool dragon lantern.

Catherine will be using her homeschool crafts skills to add dragons and decorate a paper lantern to create a really striking lampshade.

Crafts for kids are even more fun if you can make something which you can really use. And what could be nicer than learning how to decorate something you can hang in your bedroom and enjoy every night?

Because the basic crafts ideas behind learning how to decorate your own paper lantern are easy, you can adapt this homeschooling crafts project to whatever your kids like. You could decorate your own fun homeschool tiger lantern or enjoy a dolphin lantern.

Even adults will enjoy learning how to make this magical lantern.

Fun Crafts For Kids

How To Make A Lantern

What you'll need:

1. White paper lantern.
2. Colored tissue paper.
3. Cardstock.
4. Masking tape.
5. Spray mount glue.

N.B. This dragon crafts project is basically easy for kids, but when you decorate your lantern with your tissue dragon, spraying it on can be really fiddly and definitely needs adult help.

Draw A Dragon

First, start your fun crafts for kids by drawing your dragon design to decorate your lantern. That's easy if you follow Catherine's helpful step-by-step guide in our homeschooling page on How To Draw A Dragon.

You'll see how to turn rectangles, ovals and circles into tail plumes, crests and wattles to make the most fantastic homeschool dragons ever!

Learning how to draw dragons is a really useful part of homeschooling fun kids crafts because you can use the basic idea to draw all sort of different animals.

Make a Homeschool Stencil

Because it's difficult to draw directly on tissue paper, Catherine drew her dragon decoration on cardstock first. If you cut the picture out, you can use the outline left behind as a homeschool stencil. Then you can use masking tape to stick your homeschooling stencil down on the tissue paper and draw round the design, leaving you with a perfect tissue dragon to decorate your paper lantern.

Free Dragon Clipart

If your kids need a little more help with homeschooling dragon crafts, you could download some fun free dragon clipart from the internet and use those pictures to decorate your paper lantern.

Catherine's gone one better by drawing some fantastic homeschool dragon coloring pages which you can download and use for free.

Once you have your dragon picture on tissue paper, you can color your design using gel pens.

If you are homeschooling High School kids, they could forget the tissue paper, make a stencil and spray paint through it onto the lantern to decorate your design.

I have seen this work really well using gold spray paint but it's not easy to do and you need to use a face mask.

Fun Kids Crafts

Now for the fun part! Cut out your tissue paper dragon and spray mount him onto your homeschooling paper lantern.

We've used a homeschool white paper lantern. You could use a colored lantern though obviously it would let less light through. Maybe that makes it even more fun for kids!

You can paint your lantern first using acrylic paints to make a background color for your homeschooling dragon crafts. Just add a little water to the paint and brush it on with a wide brush. You could make a light blue to decorate the sky for your dragons to fly in!

All you have to do now is to hang up your fun homeschool dragon paper lantern.

N.B. Dragon crafts come into their own at night!

Wikipedia has a very interesting article about the real Lantern Festival to celebrate the end of the Chinese New Year.

Apparently, kids take paper lanterns to the temples at night and solve riddles on them, which is something I hadn't thought of - using dragon riddles to decorate paper lanterns would be really something!

Riddles are only part of the fun of learning to be a Dragonologist, as you'll find out when Catherine shows you how to use your crafts skills to make fun homeschooling model dragons in our page on homeschool Art Activities For Children. Based on the Dragonology books, she's designed her own models out of card so you can learn how to make wings and tails fit together to create a flying model dragon perfect for a dragon mobile.

When you've finished, see how much more fun you can have inventing your own species of dragon, collecting treasure and making a dragon out of junk in our page on Homeschool Activities.

More Homeschooling Fun Crafts For Kids

• Make a robot out of junk in our homeschooling crafts page on How to Build A Robot.
• Turn a shoebox into a homeschool Ocean Diorama.
• Use your crafts skills to make dinosaurs come alive in our homeschooling Dinosaurs for Kids activities.
• Get our fun homeschooling guide to getting the most out of plastic model airplane kits.
• Meet us down in the rainforest for fun kids crafts in Homeschool Science.

If you look at the Lantern Festival article, you'll see Wikipedia tells you about the beautiful crane who flew down to Earth and Taiyi, the God of Heaven, who had sixteen dragons at his beck and call - so you'll be following a long tradition by using dragon crafts to make your own lantern!

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