So - Egg Carton Insects

So - we save bits and bobs to recycle in our crafts and I decided it was time to make a dent in our egg carton stash and make some creepy crawlies with them!

So - what do we need?

• Egg cartons
• Glue
• Scissors
• Pipe Cleaners
• Googly Eyes
• Something to poke holes in your egg carton (you can use your scissors for this, or something like a knitting needle or even a skewer from the kitchen)
  

So - How did we use them?

I'd cut out some of the egg cartons a few days earlier and already painted them nice bright colours. I decided to do this prior to this craft because we have problems with waiting...this especially encompasses waiting for paint to dry - but of course you can let your child paint the egg cartons themselves, or decorate them with markers, stickers, glitter, etc...the sky is the limit here.
I cut various sizes, some single ones for smaller instects and some longer ones for other insects and creatures.

Then it was time to get Bear involved, he enthusiastically helped me cut our pipe cleaners in half for legs & feelers.
He added glue to the egg cartons & his fingers and stuck on lots of googly eyes...to the egg cartons and his fingers, much to his dismay...lol
He helped poke holes into our cartons where we wanted legs or feelers or wings.
And then he threaded the pipe cleaners through the holes and bent them into shape - with a little help from me.

And then it was time to build spider webs out of the rest of the pipe cleaners and have spiders catching flies while caterpillars and ants crept past and grasshoppers watched on! I think our bugs turned out pretty cool!

So - What did we learn?

• Motor Skills - Lots of fine motor skills happening in this craft, scissor work, glueing small things in place, threading through small holes.

• Biology - learning about the different insects we made, namely an ant, a fly, spiders & caterpillars. Information like spiders have 8 legs but insects have 6 and caterpillars have lots of legs and worms have none. Some insects have feelers but others don't etc. Bear also explained to me how flies get stuck in webs the spiders build and then the spider wraps them up with more web and bites them with their fangs - so he's definitely absorbing info :)
  

• Numbers - we counted how many eyes & legs we needed for each insects, we also had to count how many holes we needed.

• Literature - Bear picked up that some of our insects were similar to the ones in Roald Dahl's James & the Giant Peach, which he enjoys listening to (we have a collection of Roald Dahl audio books which are a big hit in our home) and also The Very Hungry Catepillar by Eric Carle