Raven and Dove Craft

The sending out of the raven and dove are important parts of the Noah's Ark story (the theme that we are following at the moment).  We are told that soon after the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat, Noah sent out a raven and a dove to see whether the flood waters had sufficiently receded so that he and everybody in the ark could disembark (Genesis 8).  The significance of the two birds in the story has been debated, with some people suggesting that the raven was an impure bird (according to Hebrew tradition) and therefore did not complete its mission - it simply flew back and forth until the waters had dried up.  The dove was a pure bird and therefore returned to Noah when it could not find a place to rest (on its first mission) and when it carried an olive leaf in its beak (on its second mission) before it too left Noah.

The biggest challenge with our raven and dove craft was finding a simple way of making a raven and a dove that didn't require artistic talent or materials that I didn't have to hand.  I decided to make the birds from paper plates, with their heads, bodies and wings being of slightly different proportions - and one being black and the other white.  I painted one of the paper plates using black ink as I didn't have any black paint to hand(!) and then drew the following outlines:

 

                           

I glued the wings to the birds' bodies so it was clear to the children that they were decorating a bird.  The beaks were made of black and orange foam paper and I had a stash of googly eyes which I thought the children would enjoy adding to their birds.  Finally I put out a pot of glue for the children to paste onto the bird's bodies and two bowls of feathers which the boys could stick to their birds.  I also included some pictures of a raven and dove for the children to refer to which I printed off from the free clipart website: www.allthingsclipart.com.

Wugs was eager to do the activity and decorated both the birds whilst his brother was napping, so I drew up another dove and gave it to Dooey to decorate.  After pasting the glue to the dove's body, he decided not to use the feathers, but decorated the bird with crayons instead.  Finally the olive leaves made from green pipe cleaners were fixed around the doves' beaks and we hung up the birds in the conservatory.

What we used:
Paper plates
Black ink (paint would obviously work better and the child could do the painting himself)
Orange and black foam (for the beaks)
Googly eyes
Glue
Black and white feathers
Green pipecleaners (for the olive leaves)

Please click here to see our other Noah's Ark-related activities.