Recycled Robot Craft for Kids

I save garbage. Like scraps of paper, scraps of yarn, boxes from food or tea…you get the idea. I have the intention of making crafts with my three year-old. Maybe you remember the owls we made back in the fall.

Let’s just say my three-year-old doesn’t make a lot of for doing crafts. Until I told him we could make robots. (I made him a robot shirt a few months ago. He likes robots.)

One problem: He thought we were making REAL robots. That would have working buttons. And talk.


So after a discussion on that, I convinced him to use some glue to attach some scraps of paper to a tea box, folded another scrap of paper into a head, and we attached some eyes and some hearts.
After another discussion on why you should not use scissors to cut pipe cleaners and why I ~not him~ was going to use the sharp seam ripper to poke holes for the pipe cleaner ‘arms’, he suggested that the robot needed hair! So out came the yarn scraps. Then he said it needed a tummy, so he used the pom-poms.

And then he asked if puppies’ fur was made of pom-poms, because both pom-poms and puppy fur are soft.

A reasonable question.

And my 18 month-old dumped out all the googly eyes and carried them throughout the second floor of our house. A week later, I’m still finding them.

After that, without me noticing, the 18 month-old took the glue stick, removed the cap and rubbed a bunch of it in his beautiful white-blond hair. (It came out after a bath.)

He’d already done the same with chapstick two weeks earlier.

This project made slight dent in the garbage I have saved for craft projects and it kept my three-year-old busy and allowed him to be creative for awhile.