Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Fun With Foam

We were on our way to my in-laws when my oldest son asked to build something with his Chief. While driving, I quickly and out of no where decided I had the perfect project! I remembered that my FIL had some foam blocks lying around last time we were there. He used those foam blocks as seats for the boys when he took them for a tractor ride, and I knew that we could put them to good use.

I asked Chief if we could use those foam blocks, some golf tees and a hammer. He instantly knew what I wanted to do. And we had a blast!

To do this, you could use any Styrofoam from any packaging or from a cooler, foam for flower pots or even fabric foam. Pretty much it just has to be soft and sturdy enough to hammer something into it.



We found that regular hammers were too heavy for the boys to use, but it's easy to find smaller hammers at any craft or hardware store. Good thing Chief had a smaller hammer on hand! 


As you can see, there were about 200 golf tees in that bag, these were free, but golf tees are inexpensive and are often available at garage sales. 


The boys also got to play with pliers and practice taking the tees out of the foam. It was just as much fun as putting them in! As you can see, it was hard for Henrik to do one handed, but it's still a great project for kids because they are using real tools to get a task done. Here you can see we put in the tees in the shape of their names. They hammered them in and recognized the letters and eventually read their names! 


And once you remove the tees, you can start all over again! And again, and again and again! You can make different patterns or ask your child to organize by color, the options are really limitless. 


This was also a great project for the boys to do because it encouraged them to be hands on with their grandparents. And there's not much better than that. 

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