Staying at home gives us a lot of opportunity to reimagine what might otherwise be, well, boring.
Take cardboard, for example.
We’re exploring the different ways you and your kids can use the cardboard lying around your houses for fun, valuable play time, like today’s art activity, Cardboard Beads.
Cardboard Beads
Children will:
Make colorful beads out of cardboard
You will need:
Colorful cereal boxes
Marker
Pencil
Ruler or straight edge
Scissors
Glue stick
Yarn
How to:
Cut the front and back panels from the box and lay them flat
Using a ruler and a marker, cut the box panels into 1-inch strips
On the plain side of each strip, place a dot near the middle of one edge. Draw diagonal lines from the bottom corners of the rectangle to the dot at the middle of the top creating a long triangle. Cut it out.
To save time, make this triangle your stencil and use it to trace many more triangles and cut them out. You are ready to roll!
Make your beads:
Use a piece of scrap paper on your work space to protect your table. Place a triangle on the paper, plain side up.
Wrap the wide end of the triangle tightly around a pencil one turn and place both on the scrap paper.
Use a glue stick to generously glue the whole rest of the triangle and roll it, as tightly as you can, all the way to the tiny point.
Be sure there is glue on that point and hold it down just along enough to make sure it stays down.
Slip the bead off the pencil.
Make several beads, varying the width and length of the triangles to make wider or plumper beads.
String them on yarn to make a necklace or a bracelet!