The Letter 'S'

Hello! I'm back a lot faster than I expected!

J received her first school parent-child assignment and I'm really excited.

We do crafts at home but they are mainly spontaneous ones. Planned activities don't go so well in this house. But parent-child assignments are different - there's opportunity for discussions and sharing.

This week, they learnt about the letter 'S' and we were encouraged to make a snake with recyclables.

It has been a really fun process so I thought I would like to pen it down.

We started with discussion the day she brought the activity sheet back.

We talked about the various materials we can use (kitchen towel rolls, old stockings, paper, socks... ) This kid knows what I have in my craft stash. 

This is our first project so there was a lot of prompting.
I asked if she wanted her snake to be a sculpture or one that can have movable parts.

She wanted one that could move so we decided on a pull-along toy, to be made with paper towel rolls.

I tried to let her work on it on her own as much as possible.

She picked out the origami papers she wanted to use from my stash, which I kind of regretted packing them neatly into an origami paper box because she can see ALL the papers I have. 

I stuck double-sided tape to the kitchen rolls and taught her how to roll it over the paper. She then stuffed the ends in to secure the paper onto the kitchen roll. Easy-peasy for small hands.

I left her be to work on the rest. She needed a little help and guidance but was pretty much able to complete it on her own.

The eyes are plain circle labels with pupils she drew on using a Sharpie. Using a Sharpie is a big deal for J, because as Momma puts it, those are "markers for grown-ups". I would have used the pistachio shells if I hadn't tossed them into the bins.

The tongue was some scrap paper we found in her scrap paper bag that was coloured over with red marker. That scrap paper bag is full of small pieces of paper from her cutting sessions. She is so into cutting lately. Imagine the horror to find "confetti" on the floor every time she works on crafts when I'm doing my chores/having a shower. 

I didn't know how to string the tubes together so that the part stayed in place so we dot The Husband's help on that.  I had J string strips of straw with a string, then using one longer straw as a needle, to string all the stringed straw pieces into the tubes.

Whoa. That was quite a mouthful.

Then I stuck double sided tape onto the straw and stuck them on the inside of the roll to keep the string in place. This feels so complicated as I'm typing this out. I'm very sure there is an easier way but I have absolutely no idea what it is.

After stringing all the tubes together, our simple snake is done!

J decided to stick animal stickers onto each section of the snake. Now it looks like a train.
Aaaaaand our first project is done!!

She had some fun pulling the toy all over the house.
So glad that her first project is like building a toy to her.


Note: The snake hardly survived being pulled around that it was falling apart on Sunday night. I had to secure more tapes onto it. I hope it stays okay through the week!