We are still thinking about activities that can be made using recycling from round the house. If you are able to save your egg boxes there are loads of craft ideas for little ones. A quick google will find you millions. Here are a few that we’ve been making this week. We started with daffodils in time for Easter and I’d planned to make chicks as well but my wee ones were much more interested in snails and turtles, and why not, they make a perfect shell! As always, how much wee ones can help will depend on their age. For older toddlers they can help you cut out but with babies you can cut out the parts yourself first and let them play with the shapes and then paint them. You can adapt these ideas for what you have at home and you can use last week’s homemade paints to decorate them if you like. Children also come up with the best ideas so go with the flow of what they are interested in making. You can also adapt the decorations to whatever you have about the house.
We used:
- Old egg boxes
- Water based, non-toxic paints (but you can also decorate with pens or chalks or whatever you have at home)
- scissors
- tape or pva for sticking together
- scrap coloured paper
- pipe cleaners (you can also use straws or sticks or simply stick the daffodils to a painting)
- play dough or clay if you have it
- some bits and bobs for decorating
- A daffodil for inspiration!
Daffodils
You need to cut out the tall middle cones of the egg box to make the trumpets and the egg holding sections make the petals. We cut ours into four petal shapes.
Handily the trumpets already have a wee hole so you just need to poke a hole in the petal section and let wee ones thread in a pipe cleaner if they’re big enough. Then thread on the trumpet and roll a ball in the end of the pipe cleaner so it can’t pull back through. You can also add a blob of pva to keep it all together.
And then get painting. For babies it will be easier to paint before you thread the pieces together.
If you don’t have anything for a stem these also look really nice glued on to a painting. Here is an example from our neighbour.
Animals
We used the egg sections to become shells for snails and turtles. Where they were joined together there is already a handy hole for the head to pop out.
You could use some old play dough if you have any around. Roll it into a slug shape and then magically transform it into a snail with a shell. Add antennae and then paint. We did the same with a turtle adding a head, legs and tail.
You can also make the body parts from paper or card. Here we rolled up one end of a strip of paper to be the head and tail and added extra legs for the turtle.
My wee ones decided the snails needed a garden and so we went off on a tangent painting some grass and sticking on flowers cut from some of our junk mail. Delicious for the snails to eat.
Here are a couple more of our egg box creations. They make cute little nests and jazzy glasses! Have a go and see what your family come up with.