Easy Origami Animals for Kids

It's a rainy Saturday, and your seven-year-old came home from school wanting to fold paper animals, a whole zoo of them. Print a few pages, cut some squares, and start with the cat.

Seven easy origami animals for children, folded from one square of paper each, with a numbered picture for every fold. Cat, dog, fox, rabbit, owl, fish and bat are all made from simple straight folds, so a child of about seven can follow the pictures with a little help from a parent or teacher. The book also holds six sheets of printable patterned paper, ready to be cut into squares.

Inside (17 pages, US Letter, margins that also fit A4):
- Page 1: cover
- Page 2: how to read the diagrams, with one key used on every page (valley fold, mountain fold, fold and unfold, colored side, white side)
- Page 3: how to make a square from any paper, and a table of the seven models with their level and number of folds
- Pages 4 to 10: one page for each animal, with its crease pattern, three to five fold pictures with a sentence under each, and a finished picture with a drawing tip
- Page 11: a zoo page for lining up your animals, with a check box for each
- Pages 12 to 17: six sheets of patterned paper (stripes, dots, checks, waves, diamonds, leaves), four squares to a sheet. A grown-up cuts along the black dotted cutting lines.

How it works: start with the white side up. Each picture shows the paper as it looks before a fold, with the fold line and an arrow, and the next picture shows the result. Every fold in the book was simulated step by step by computer before the diagrams were drawn, and the crease pattern for each animal was checked to fold into the same flat shape. The models were not test-folded by hand. These are classic beginner folds, with diagrams drawn for this book. The models are marked by level (one or two dots out of three).

Print on regular paper, or on thin craft paper for the thickest folds.

This printable was created with the help of AI tools, then checked fact by fact.

Made by Made for This Day — we wrote it, we sell it, and we answer for it.

Instant digital download. Nothing is posted to you — the file is yours the moment you pay, and you can print it as many times as you like.