Jiggly Robot
You know you’ve raised a Star War fan-let when kiddo screams C3P0 and R2D2 in your ear when the Clone Wars is on tele. Here’s the little trooper.
Kiddo’s been wanting to her own buddy droids to add to her entourage of plushes and put-togethers….so it’s time to hit the recycle bin (though I’d been wishing to trawl them out of ebay…after seeing the prices, the following cheapskate option turned out to be a pretty good idea). Guess play at her age is still largely any object and a whole lot of imagination.
Kiddo had simply stuck some coloured paper on the sides of a toilet roll on her own to make R2D2 but I reckon I’d better ‘facilitate’ with C3P0.
What you need are:
- 2 ice cream sticks
- 1 rubber band
- 5 toilet rolls
- sticky tape
- scissors
- staple
- colour paper
- markers, crayons
- and maybe a picture of C3P0 on your smartphone
Instructions:
- Get kiddo to draw out C3P0. Facilitate by asking her what it looks like (does it have googly eyes, small nose, mouth etc etc…. what shapes are its head, body etc etc…show picture of C3P0 if need be). Kiddo will want to draw a full figure so let it be. Just make sure that the drawing is big enough to be cut apart and recomposed later onto the structure that you’d have to do for kiddo.
- While you get kiddo to draw and colour in her droid, get the following done.
- That’s the main torso. Then make small incision points on the ends of the rolls to stack in the torso to the base. Secure the rolls together with sticky tape.
- Then once kiddo’s done, get/help her to cut up the body. Kiddo may freak out a little if you start ‘butchering’ up the artwork (mine did), so do explain to her nicely what’s going to happen later.
- Attach head to the end of ice cream stick.
- Adhere arms to pieces of cardboard so they hold their shapes. Then stick them onto the ends of the ice cream sticks. Fold them into C3P0’s angled positions.
- Adhere legs separately onto the base rolls.
- Last but not least get her to shake her new droid buddy a bit to see its head and arms jiggle.
- For more ‘complex’ option, you may want to replicate the ice cream sticks-in-roll idea for its lower limbs too.
