3 Manual Activities With Plastic Bottles
In this article we will discover some of the manual activities that can be carried out with the plastic bottles that we have at home and that we have not yet gotten rid of.
During school holidays, such as Christmas or summer, children have many more free hours every day. One of the occupations that can keep them busy, as well as developing their creativity and imagination, is carrying out manual activities.
As always, we try to offer you manual activities that require the use of simple materials and that you normally keep at home. On this occasion, the basic material from which we will start is made up of plastic bottles.
Nowadays, it is important to instill in children an awareness of how important it is to use this material to a minimum. A good idea for giving plastic bottles a second life is to make several new items.
It is equally important that, during these manual activities, you are always close to your children, because it will be necessary to cut the bottles, an action that should not be performed by the little ones.
Manual activities with plastic bottles
Animals made with plastic bottles
Children love animals. For this reason, one of the activities with plastic bottles that they will most appreciate will be this one, because it will offer them the possibility to create different animals from a single object. To do this, you will need:
- A plastic bottle.
- Colored cardboard.
- A pair of scissors.
- Colors.
- Brushes.
The first step will be to make a mark on the bottom of the bottle, because for this manual activity you will only need the bottom of the bottle. After you have cut it out, the next step is to decorate and paint it, depending on the animal you have chosen.
If you have several bottles of water, you can use them to create different animals, such as a pig, a zebra or a cow. The possibilities are endless – all you need is your imagination.
A piggy bank
Nothing will please children more than creating their own piggy bank to put aside the money they save. On this occasion, you have two options: you can set aside only the banknotes or also the coins.
If you choose the first option, you will not need to make any cuts on the bottle, because you can use its mouth to introduce the banknotes. If, on the other hand, you also want to keep the coins, in order to introduce them you will have to make a cut on the front of the bottle.
You also have two options to decorate it: line it with paper or paint it directly with color.
To infinity and beyond, aboard a rocket!
If the manual activities you do together can then be used by your children as toys, creating them will be even more fun for them. For this reason, they will be thrilled to bring their space rocket to life. To do this, you will need the following materials:
- A plastic bottle.
- Paint of the color of your choice.
- Cardboard.
- Sheets of gray paper.
- A pair of scissors.
- Glue.
- Adhesives.
The first step is to paint the plastic bottle in the color of your choice. After you have colored it, you can apply as many stickers as you like and, in this way, further customize the rocket. The next step will be to make the rocket wings and the front. For this purpose, we will use cardboard:
- You will create the front part by forming a cone with the gray sheets of paper.
- For the wings, on the other hand, you will use cardboard and then you will line them with sheets of paper.
The frog game, one of the manual activities with plastic bottles that children will like most
There are games that, despite the passing of the years, never go out of fashion. These are the so-called traditional games. In particular, it is one of these games that we will build with a plastic bottle.
More specifically, we are talking about the frog game. Remember that frog with its mouth open in which we used to play introducing tokens? In fact, this is the frog that we will make with the following materials:
- A large bottle of water, 5 liters or more.
- Colored cards.
- Glue.
- A pair of scissors.
The first step will be to create the frog’s mouth. To do this, we will drill a hole in the front of the bottle, on its upper half, wide enough to be able to insert the tokens correctly.
After we have created the slit, we will make the eyes, the corner of the mouth and the legs of the frog on the colored cards. And here we have a nice game ready to play with!
