Do your kids love ocean creatures? Do they have a favorite cartoon with an octopus? This easy octopus toddler craft printable is a great way to pass the time and help your child develop fine motor skills and important pre-k crafting skills.

If you’re interested in more activities to develop other pre-k skills, check out these posts.

There are small paper pieces that your child can practice pincer grasp skills. If you trust them with the glue or hole punch your toddler can work on grip and hand muscles. Walk your toddler through to learn colors and counting.

Perfect Valentine’s Day Craft!

If your kids are a fan of Finding Dory, they’ll know that octopuses have three hearts. What a perfect symbol for Valentine’s Day! Once you’ve constructed your Octopuses, there is plenty of room to write a note on the back for the special people in your toddler’s life.

What’s Included in the Printable Octopus Toddler Craft:

The printable includes a color-it-yourself octopus for kids that love to color. My girls haven’t quite developed an affinity for coloring on paper yet. Each other’s faces, yes, but paper or whatever mommy wants them to draw on, yeah sure mom.

There are 8 octopus bodies with tentacles and eyes. The colors include:

• Purple
• Blue
• Green
• Yellow
• Orange
• Red
• Pink
• Color-it-yourself

I’ve also included spots and two mouths. There are two hats and bows. The eyes come with or without eyelashes with the ability to customize which direction your children want their octopuses to look. 

My two toddlers loved this activity and continued to play with their octopuses after the activity was over. We played the soundtrack from Hotel Transylvania 3 and they got their toddler boogie on! They loooooove the dancing Kraken scene of the movie. So I decided they needed their own dancing octopuses.

 I printed the Octopuses out on cardstock to make sure they were more durable for the excessive amount of glue I expected to be used to attach the limbs.

Supplies You’ll Need for the Printable Octopus Toddler Craft:

• The Free Printable at the bottom of this page.
• Scissors.
• School Glue.

That’s it! Minimal supplies! Maximum cuteness!

Octopus Construction

You can mix and match colors or keep your Octopuses one color. 

I suggest you cut out all the pieces ahead of time. I placed all the pieces for one Octopus in a plastic bag and let my kids discover the pieces they wanted to use. The Octopuses in the picture are their creations (with a little guidance.) Many of the octopuses definitely didn’t look like Octopuses. And we have many septo-puses. 🙂 

There really is no specific order for how you would like to complete this craft. This is the kids chance to get creative! But if you want guidance, this is what I did. 

Start with the large circle, this is the body of the Octopus. Help your child glue on the eyes, show them how you can re-arrange the eyes to make different expressions. Add the mouth and hat. From there you can add the tentacles around the border of the body. I added the spots last to make sure they were spread across the tentacles and body.

If you want an easier way to make spots for the octopuses and want to give your child more of a challenge, print out extra octopus bodies and use a hole punch. Added skill and activity!

Googly eyes are also a great addition to this craft! I wanted to make sure that this was easy for all your exhausted parents out there so I tried to make sure you could do the whole activity by just printing it out. 

Thanks for reading! 

Please share your child’s creations (or yours) below in the comments! I’d love to see what everyone comes up with. 

Let me know if you liked this craft and if you want to see more like it. I always appreciate feedback!

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you have a safe New Year!

Best, 

Katie