dinosaur!

Recently J brought home from preschool: a chunk of poster board and the assignment to make a dinosaur. I immediately thought of one of my favorite blogs, Made by Joel, and some of the simple toys he makes for his kids. We’ve tried out a couple of his ideas and have loved every one. Interestingly enough before I could even made the suggestion; J told me he thought we should try something like the slotted disks project to make the dinosaur. That was a project I got from Made by Joel!!! Kindred Imaginations!!!

Anyway, this is what we came up with.

I’ll admit that this time was pretty much me designing and then J merely assembling and decorating. I usually try to stand back a bit to let the kid develop and execute their own ideas, but I guess I just got a little carried away.

If you want to try your own, right click on and copy this image.

Paste it into your favorite photo editing program and size it to an 8.5x11 sheet and use it as a pattern on some really stiff paper.  (Empty cereal boxes are a perfect weight.)  In the photo below, I'm showing how/where I scored the legs to get them to bend smoothly and in the right spot.  Hopefully you can tell from the above photos how to connect the slots.

We used glue dots to adhere the googly eyes because a) we weren’t feeling patient enough for regular glue to dry and b) the slick backs on googly eyes usually just peel off glue too easily anyway.
(funny side-note:  When we proudly turned in J's creation we discovered that it was intended to be stapled to a bulletin board, not so much a 3-D creation. C'est la vie. :)

With the freedom of summer just a week away in our school district, we are starting to collect creative project ideas. What projects are you people thinking of doing this summer??? Please post links in the comments if you have any!!