A Sessa Blog: Litter Bugs Earth Day Craft!

At our house this week, instead of celebrating just Earth Day, we are doing an entire week!

So after researching for what seemed like forever for some fun Earth Day crafts last night, I gave up and decided we’d have to come up with our own. Everything online seemed like it was for much older kids, or I was going to have to go out and buy new supplies, which defeated the purpose.

So I came up with the theme for today, “Litter Bugs”.

I decided to use items we already had around the house to make little trash cans (or storage containers) so that we could store craft scraps that could be used again, or so we wouldn’t make a mess. At least, that’s really the only way you can explain it to a 3 year old. As everyone knows, I’m a super organized person and so anything that involved making new and cute storage opportunities was a plus!

Items needed:
Construction paper (or news paper if you really want to recycle, then paint over it)
Glue
Scissors
Empty container (we used the Gerber Crunchies containers since we go through about 3 cans a week)
Markers (we used the “Do a Dot” markers)
Whatever you want to decorate with… we used pipe cleaners, pom poms, jewels, and google eyes.

Instructions:

1.Cover containers in construction paper. (Hot glue works the best)

2. Hand them over to the kids! At this point I just let them decorate alone with markers. Especially if you are making bugs, the kids can be really colorful and creative!

I forgot to take a picture however because Cooper is a CRAZY man when it comes to markers…EVERYTHING in a canvas.

3. Decide what your can is going to be. Originally we were just doing bugs since I themed it “litter bugs” but… Pink pig insisted that hers was a pig.

4. Glue whatever your accessories are. We cut out ears and a snout for Ally’s pig out of constructon paper. And used pipe cleaners for legs, eyes and antennas. You really can make anything!

5. Let dry and your done!

During Cooper’s nap Ally and I made this “Dog treat” container to look like Lexie.

Over all this is a really simple craft. Ally did almost everything on her own (except covering the can and gluing the ears). Cooper was able to color his and he also helped with a lot of the gluing. With Cooper it took us an hour and a half to finish 3, but just doing one alone with Ally took about 20 minutes.

Overall:
Time: 30 minutes to 1 hour depending on age of child