As you probably already know, as much as I love being creative, I love it more when it uses recycled materials. During the time that we are all staying home, I have been even more focused than usual on using recycled materials because I want everyone to work with what they have instead of feeling they have to buy supplies.
The activity I am presenting here, bottle people, can be made entirely with recycled materials, and, even better, it might inspire you to find your own creative or engineering challenges. For example, one student wondered how to make the head move smoothly side to side. I don't immediately know the answer to that question but exploring the idea would be great fun.
For now, we are going to focus on the basics, and I hope you will share with me your ideas of how to take this idea even further.
The supplies I used for this activity are a plastic bottle, a piece of cardboard, a pencil, and newspaper.
Cutting out a head is the hardest part, and small hands might need an adult's help. I chose to use an oval but you could also draw a face and hair on the cardboard first and cut around it. If you can, use single-walled cardboard since it is easier to cut. You could also use chipboard, i.e. the cardboard that forms cracker and cereal boxes. Make sure to draw a face before or after you cut out the head.
There are so many options for hair depending on what you have at home, but I decided to keep mine simple and use newspaper. I cut it into strips and then curled them onto a pencil so they'd look a little crazy.
Once the hair is in place, it is necessary to attach the head to the body. I poked a pencil in between the cardboard layers to hold the head. If you are using chipboard, you can just tape the pencil on the back.
At this point, you can let the pencil wiggle around in the bottle if you want the head to move, or you can wrap a crumpled piece of newspaper around it to wedge it into the neck bottle. The second option will keep the head still.
Lastly, the bottle body needs clothes, arms, and maybe legs. I decided to make a pleated skirt for mine. I cut a strip of newspaper long enough to wrap around and wide enough to cover from the "waist" to the bottom of the bottle. I folded it so that the skirt would poof out a bit on the bottom.
Then I added a wrap-around shirt and some newspaper arms, and I was done!
As you may have noticed in the supplies photo, I also tried it with a yogurt cup. I used a pin to poke a hole and then widened it with a sharpened pencil. The fun thing about that plan is that I could adjust the height of the pencil to make it bobble around a bit. My son made this bottle person with the yogurt cup:
This is a great example of how different the bottle people can be! Enjoy and please share what you have made!