Prepare to Blast Off…

 

My two sons love to make things out of old cereal boxes, egg cartons, plastic bottles, milk bottle lids and such like.  I can barely make it to the re-cycling bin with an empty carton before I hear a cry of “Mummy can I have that to make something with?” I find it very hard to refuse them. I love to see what they come up with is as much as they like making it.  It does drive my husband mad though as our house is always littered with the boys projects at various stages of completion. I must admit though yesterday when I was tidying up their rooms, I did manage to smuggle out a few of their old projects.  They had finished and forgotten about them and I managed to get them into the recycling bin before they caught me.

They re usually happy enough devising their own projects which is great, but sometimes I like to sit down with them, usually when their little sister is napping and we set to work making something in particular together. On this occasion we decided to make rockets.  Both boys have been learning about Space this term at school and pre-school, so it something that they share an interest in at the moment. I had the perfect pieces of recycling put to one side for them.  We had prepared a large family brunch recently and we had a few empty fruit juice bottles.  Looking at them I immediately thought that they would make excellent rockets.

Here’s how we did it:

1. The boys chose a colour each and painted their juice bottles all over.
   
2. 1. They then each painted an empty toilet roll tube holder with a different
      coloured paint.
   2. Whist these dried the boys cut out faces from magazines to be used as the
      “Astronauts” on the rocket.  Photographs would also be really good for this.
   3. My Pre-schooler stuck his faces inside some milk bottle tops which he thought would make great windows. My 6 year old decided to use some used clean tinfoil for his windows and he stuck his faces onto these.
   4. Unfortunately once dried the paint my 4 year old had used on his bottle began to peel off when he picked it up.  I had to take quick action to avoid a blast off from him.  I had initially thought of using tissue paper to cover the bottles, so I quickly grabbed some glue and tissue paper and we quickly re covered his bottle using this.  Phew!
   5. We then attached the windows onto the side of their rockets.  We used double sided tape to attach the bottle tops as glue never seems to work out well for us when securing bottle tops.
   6. We then took the painted toilet roll holder and we snipped 1/3 of the way up all around the bottom  of the tube and a few smaller snips around the top of it to make it easier to attach to the bottom of the rocket.

1. Before sticking the tube onto the bottom of the rocket we attached a few pieces of wool to the bottom of the rocket with sticky tape.
2. We then used sticky tape to attach the tube to the rocket.
3. We were ready for Blast Off!