Giant cardboard rocket ship

The kids had so much fun with the melon box wendy house/shanty town we made a few months ago, that I thought it was time to create another recycled monumental obstruction in our living room.

Being winter rather than summer this time, we ended up using a potato box instead of a watermelon box as the base for the structure. Again though, all the cardboard was brought home after a trip to Costco. It took about 15 sheets of the corrugated cardboard that they have inbetween the pallets of diaper boxes/toilet rolls/cereal boxes.

The design was limited by the irregular octagonal shape of the potato box base, so it looks like a bit of a weird rocket, but I think without that sturdy base box it wouldn't last two minutes with the number of kids that it will be subjected to.

Like the wendy house, it only took one evening after the kids were in bed to build the structure (exacto knife, stapler and duct tape), but this time I really wanted to decorate it, so the next night I stuck on a load of aluminium foil and painted the rest of it. Finished it off by trimming the door with duct tape so it wouldn't rip when being played with and printed out and stuck on some American flags and a NASA logo. The windows were from some plastic packaging that I had held onto rather than putting in the recyling bin.

The timing was pretty cool, because the kids woke up to a huge rocket ship decked out in American colours ready for Obama's inauguration. We had a load of kids over that day and they had a lot of fun playing in it. It seemed like a fitting preschool analogy for launching on a mission with a new leader.

On the inside I didn't have much time to sort out too many things, but I did glue gun some dollar store glow in the dark numbers to a panel and some other random bottle top button things. I made a safety switch "blast off" button. It's made from the lid of a coffee creamer bottle that flips up to reveal a button. The button is really a glue gunned in place old keyring that is an aeroplane and makes crazy take off noises when you press it.
Here it is in operation, sorry about the dreadful video, it's rather dark in the rocket (I have torches in there for the kids at the moment, but want to sort out some weird cabin lighting when I get the chance).

The other weird thing in there is the "Captain Pajamo, remote-control, techno-robotic, alien communicator". This is actually a second hand kid's tape deck with two microphones attached that I got from goodwill, but the kids favourite book at the moment is Captain Pajamas (another book that we picked up from Goodwill), and just having pictures of him on it and being able to amp up their voices extra loud and radio sounding is enough to get screams of laughter from them.

There were eleven kids over in total for inauguration day and we managed about five at a time in the rocket. We made some blue and red cakes with white icing and sprinkles for them to celebrate too.Even if they didn't totally get the significance, I think they had a good day.

Home made toy carwash

It was another day with four kids aged four and under and I had nothing planned. The two older kids started off drawing pictures of cars and trucks and then asked me to draw a carwash for them. It seems carwashes either terrify small children or excite them to the point of near barfing. These kids are in the latter group. To them a carwash is like the preschooler equivalent of Great America's bestest rollercoaster and you don't have to be over 40 inches tall to ride.

Anyway, after talking excitedly about car washes for a while they decided that it would be best if we actually made one, so I grabbed a load of stuff out of the recycling bin and pulled out a pack of those foam sheets that my friend had got for us, that were on sale because they were christmas colours.

The older kids did most of the work/help by cutting out all the foam and cutting fringes onto it to make the rollers. They also coloured in all the signage and the wheel guides for the floor of the carwash.
I hastily cut holes in a diaper box and glue gunned all the bits on. The top roller is a wooden spoon wrapped in tin foil and shoved into a paper towel tube. The cut up foam sheets were glued on top. Then there were a couple of dangly washing strip thingies made out of more foam sheets and some old packing material. There wasn't enough room to make side rollers that actually turned like the top one, so I just glued on half a cardboard tube with more of the foam frondy things the kids cut out. The kids specifically asked for a sign that said "thank you" as you were leaving, and windows so you could see the car going through (a local car wash has windows like this - seriously cheap fun, as cheap as visiting the "pauper's zoo" in fact (Petco))

Luckliy the barbie cars we have both fitted through it. Later in the day they took to sending barbie through sat in her convertable, poor lass. They even sent Polly pocket through on a scooter. We fixed up a toll booth and they played quite happily with the monstrosity for quite some time, although now they want to make an entire village out of diaper boxes. Apparently they feel that the next building we need is a Post Office. Who knew that Post Offices were next on the "exciting" list after car washes?!?

Colour and cut out food

My kids went a bundle for the colour and cut out robot parts. We made 2D robots on sheets of paper with aluminium foil shapes and those colour and cut out bits rather than making more from boxes.

The thing that they seemed to like about the way I had drawn the images was that it was easy to make it look good. They didn't have any frustrations about colouring inside the lines (my 4 year old really doesn't like it when she goes over the lines on something for some reason. It's probably just a phase she's going through I guess). My older daughter also was happy that the cutting out was easy because of the thick black lines. Having only just turned 4, she can use the scissors, but can't cut shapes that are too complicated yet. I guess the nature of these drawings gave them some extra confidence in their own abilities and so they liked it.

With this in mind I thought it would be nice to try another theme, making the same style of images. I settled on food as a subject and drew out three pages of food items with a sharpie, scanned them in and printed a few copies out. They spent quite some time colouring them. My older daughter wanted to keep colouring, so I cut a few of them out for my younger daughter to play with on a paper plate.

Again, in case you want to have a go, here are the three pages of drawings I did. It was kind of tricky to think of food that was recognisable with such basic line drawings, so a few you're just going to have o use your best guess on!

Just click on the iddy biddy pics on the left to see the full resolution pics and print them out for colouring and cutting food fun.

Drawing robots

This was a neat project because me and the man with which I am affiliated got to build it together on the weekend when the party animal children we have created finally decided it was nap time.

I'm sorry to say that we split the tasks in a very stereotypical way, in that he got the soldering iron and I got the glue gun, but it was still a lot of giggles to do.

Here is some video footage of the robotic dance of art that took place on our kitchen floor...



We used some old containers and dollar store pens to make the structure and then added a weighted motor (one from an old Nintendo rumble pack we found at Savers for $3, and the others from dollar store handifans with glue weighting one of the propellors on each motor), powered with some AAA batteries in cases repurposed from various defunct electronics and switches superglued onto the top of the motors. The flashing lights came out of some old broken toys that my mate was getting rid of.

Here is the small tripod robot...

and here is the larger double motor, 5 pen robot...


The kids thought these little robots were really funny. The older ones (4 year olds) grasped that the motor was making it vibrate and that's what was causing the drawing, but the younger ones (2 year olds) really thought the little bots were alive and were talking to them and trying to coax them in one direction or another.
Very cute and we covered a load of butcher's block paper with their artwok. Enough to keep us in wrapping paper for a while.

I realised after we built it that the little robot had the pens glued on all wrong, because once they run out we'll have to trash it and build another, so with the bigger bot I glued the pen lids onto the container, rather than the pens themselves, so that way the kids can swap out the colours that it draws with. Cunning huh!

I'm trying to encourage the husband to start up his own blog featuring the electronics projects he does for the kids. Feel free to harrass him too via the comments section of this post ;)

Aluminium foil robots

We kind of made some robots a while back with aluminium foil and random empty boxes, yoghurt pots and containers, but it was pretty basic and I totally failed to photograph any of it.

But... today we finished off what was left of the random tea bags that were in the cupboard and I found myself with the same number of teabag boxes as children at the kitchen table, so more robots seemed like a quick and easy and entertaining plan.

I covered the boxes in the aluminium foil for them and then they set about putting stickers and sequins on for buttons. While they were doing this I drew and cut out some robot mouths and arms for them to stick on and they drew and coloured on them with sharpies too. Once they were done they picked out the colour pipe cleaner that they wanted and we taped it on the top as antenna.


The finished robots made me chuckle. They all look a bit malfunctional, but very enthusiastic.

As I was hurredly scribbling the arms and mouths and cutting them out I thought it might be a nice idea to make a page or so of robot bits and bobs that could be coloured in, cut out and stuck onby the kids, so in anticipation of more robot fun and in the hope that you too might print it out and make your own dizzy looking bots, here are a couple of pages of parts I scribbled out just now.

They are a bit rough due to the 10 minutes I spent drawing them, but I was careful to put a nice thick black line around the outside of them, so if any kids that are 4 or 5 want to cut them out themselves, they have easy lines to cut around. There's enough to make 3 robots on these two pages and you can even choose to make a ladybot and give them hearts too. There's one with two hearts because I heart Dr who.

Just click on the images opposite to see the full size pics and print to your heart's content.

I've included some sets of eyes, because there's always aluminium foil around, but not always plastic boggly eyes. There are three ownership labels too, because kids love having their names on stuff.