"So I have a small family daycare and we do tons of the crafts from your site.  I have a thing for paper plate crafts!  We did forest animals last week and I came up with the porcupine idea.  We live on Vancouver island and there are no porcupines here, so these children are not likely to encounter one unless they leave the island. ( we also have no skunk or moose)"

Materials:

• paper plate,
• black marker
• brown cardboard, card stock or construction paper
   
  • For the quills I used the brown stiff backing to a pad of paper, the piece of cardboard at the back making it stiff, but you could also use poster board type paper. Construction paper would probably work but might not be stiff enough
• scissors or cutter
• glue
• Optional:  brown poster paint

Instructions:

• I cut a regular size paper plate in half then trimmed off the edge, leaving a little of the curve of the plate.
• Then in one corner I drew a simple face. ( My kids are all three and under, older children could do it themselves).
• I cut the cardboard from the back of a pad of paper using my big paper cutter. 
  • It was an 8 x 11 pad of paper so I cut it first in half length wise then started cutting from one end.
  • I rocked the paper slightly back and forth so the piece being cut off was wide at one end and pointed at the other.
  • You could do this with scissors too but it went very quick through the cutter.
• Then, starting at the tail end of the porcupine we just started gluing the quills on.  I pointed mine up slightly but towards the back.  The kids of course had much more creative ways of doing it.
• Note from Leanne:  Optional:  You could let the children paint the plates before you glue on the quills but they look cute left white too so it depends on what your kids like to do and how long you want the project to take -- when Kaitlyn was 3 or 4 one of her favorite things to do was paint paper plates (even if we didn't do anything with them afterwards *laugh*)