Rowdy turned one in January. One year olds don't need a lot of planned activities at a birthday party, but his friends who are three and older would appreciate something to do. I was on the hunt for a simple craft project that would require minimal supervision and then would be fun to play with at a dinosaur themed birthday party.
I have seen a few different dinoculars projects. These involve decorating the tubes before gluing them together. This would be great if you were working on the project with one kid, or if an adult wanted to make multiple, but a bunch of preschoolers and toddlers won't want to wait for glue to dry. Therefore, I decided to take a different approach and glue the toilet paper tubes together BEFORE decorating them.
The crafting station has:
- Dinoculars bases - pre-glued toilet paper tubes (or cut in half paper towel tubes) with holes already punched
- Pre-cut paper ready to decorate
- Tape
- Stickers (foam ones are best used after)
- pre-cut ribbon for parents to tie to the ends. ~2.5 ft
- INSTRUCTIONS
I felt like this would be a simple craft project that kids could do with minimal supervision. I hoped it would be self explanatory. (Or at least easy enough to figure out what to do.)
DINOCULARS INSTRUCTIONS
- Decorate Paper (save foam stickers for step #3)
- Tape paper around pre-glued tubes
- Add foam stickers (if desired)
- Tie ribbon into holes
- Search for Dinosaurs!!
When I created the instructions, I put Grandmama and Lucky to work to see if they could accomplish the project as written.
It was a success! Lucky wanted to make some more straight away but I told him he needed to wait until Rowdy's birthday party.
The dinoculars were a huge success! it was wonderful to see kids having fun making them and then going around my house hunting for different dinosaurs!
Lucky played with his long after the party. I'm so glad I took the time to get this project ready for the party. It was super easy to prep and the enjoyment was fantastic. I also printed out some dinosaur coloring book pages for the kids to decorate.
Even Rowdy found the project very entertaining. I wouldn't let him play with ones that had a ribbon, and he might have ripped off all of the stickers, but this is about as much enjoyment as a 12 month old can get out of a project!
This wasn't just enjoyable for my human children, Indy really likes to chew on toilet paper rolls so he was very interested in this craft project.
Don't worry, Indy. I still have quite the stash of paper tubes. I'll let you have some, too.
