We love to make crafts from anything and everything that we can find around the house! It's impossible not to create a lot of waste when you have a family of 4 and go through so much food, and we do a lot of recycling, but sometimes I do keep some things for the children to play with (we love tubes!) and all sorts of boxes and pots to craft with!
I'm writing this post as a part of ALLterNATIVE Learning's 'Natural Parenting and Earth Month' Blog Hop. Loads of different bloggers from around the world are taking part, sharing all sorts of ideas for being more natural and kinder to the environment in the lead up to Earth Day. Take a look at ALLterNATIVE Learning to learn more and to enter the giveaway! You can also take a look at In The Playroom's post about Crafting with Sticks!
Today we made a bee and a ladybug shaker, perfect for welcoming spring and making a bit of noise while we're at it! We really wanted to embrace the upcycling philosophy, so we used as many things that would otherwise be thrown away as we could.
Materials:
- yogurt pots
- lentils (rice, pasta, beans or similar would do as well)
- scrap paper
- glue
- tape
- black paint
- pipe cleaners
We started by looking in the cupboards for a filler for our shakers, and happened to find loads of red lentils that are soon to expire, so that was the perfect place to start! We have quite the selection of yogurt pots to choose from, so we chose 2 larger pots for the bee and 2 smaller pots for the ladybug. Ethan filled one large pot and one small pot with lentils.
The next step is to secure the yogurt pots together so the the lentils can't escape with all that shaking! First we used white glue along the edges of the pots, once that dried I also wrapped tape around the whole thing just to be safe.
Next comes the fun part, collecting up all of our scrap paper and sorting it by colour! We pulled out all of the yellow and red that we could find, we have tissue paper, construction / sugar paper, and even some foam and felt. I then cut up the scraps into small pieces and Ethan glued as many yellow pieces as he could onto the bee and red pieces onto the ladybug. We then left the glue to dry so that the pieces of paper were securely in place.
Once the glue was dry I found some pipe cleaners that we had been playing with in a sensory bin and tied them around each of our bugs for the antennas. I thought that might make it easier for Ethan to have something to hold onto as he painted (he is often quite resistant to getting messy).
The next step was to paint some spots on our ladybug and some stripes on our bee. I wasn't sure how much help Ethan might need with this step, but he did it all on his own, even their little faces, so I was very proud of him.
Another little while to wait for our bugs to dry, but as soon as the paint was set it was time to shake, shake, shake! Ethan loves playing with his bug shakers, and I love that we reused and upcycled as many things as we could, and that he really did make these almost completely by himself!
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