Hello fellow Pinstrositeers! My name is Diedre, and I'm Marquette's favorite little sister (don't tell the others I said that!) I'm a stay at home mom who likes to read, cook yummy things (especially if chocolate is on the ingredient list!), and dabble a bit in the blogging world (if you're bored, you can check out my blog here). Marquette asked me if I'd like to write up a guest post for you all, so here we go. Actually, if I were to be honest, I'd tell you that she asked me to do this something like six months ago, and because I'm a lazy bum I'm just now getting around to doing it. But why would I tell you that when I could just say something like "I was wanting to do something to help out while Marquette and "Merle" get settled, so I decided to write up a Pinstrosity post so she would have one less thing worry about." I like that one, it makes me sound way better, let's just stick with option number 2, shall we?
One of my favorite uses for Pinterest is finding new ways to keep my super active toddler busy. I learned quickly that if he's bored then things go down hill VERY fast, so I try to have a few ideas in reserve for such days. Now, I could just plunk him down in front of the TV (and sometimes I do) but that doesn't do much to use up his mountains of energy or enrich his world in any way, so I try really hard to come up with fun things to do that are also in some way beneficial. I must also admit though that I am cheap and lazy, so I'm a huge fan of activities that require little (or NO) prep work and that don't require special supplies.
Around Halloween time, I stumbled across a pin for an activity that was perfect for us (aka: super easy and didn't require a trip to the store), but that we didn't get around to doing until just a few days ago (did I mention I'm lazy?)
The Original Pin
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| http://handsonaswegrow.com/halloween-activity-a-sticky-spider-web/ |
Really, you could do this one without ever reading the blog post, it's pretty apparent from the picture what's going on. You take some painter's tape, make a spider web in a doorway, and throw things at it to see them stick. The result is your kid is kept occupied while also building muscles and hand/eye coordination. Yes, it does take two or three minutes to slap the tape up in some sort of spider web configuration, and then you have to wad up some paper to throw, but if it keeps the little monsters busy for a while then it's worth it, right?
The Pinstrosity
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| Perhaps it's a little hard to see why this is a flop, keep reading... |
Well, I happily set to work sticking the tape to my doorway, but the thing about painter's tape is that it's made to come off without taking paint with it, and I just couldn't get the tape to stick to the painted door frame. No problem, I just stuck it to the wooden frames of my two chairs in my living room instead. While I constructed the web, I set my two year old down with some paper to wad up. Things seemed to be going great, that is until we were finished our prep work and tried to get things started.
I grabbed a ball of paper, and excitedly demonstrated what would happen when it was thrown into the web. It bounced off.
Ummm... that must've been a freak accident, right? I cheerfully picked up another wadded paper and tried again, and it bounced off. Again.
We tried a few more times with no success, and I even tried just walking up to the web and sticking my paper wad right onto the tape. It held for a few seconds, then dropped.
Obviously, the paper wasn't going to work. Thinking I was smart, I grabbed the roll of tape, made a ball out of it (sticky side out), and threw that at the web. It stuck alright, but it was quite a bit heavier than the paper and it started pulling the web apart, so that was a no go.
At this point I decided I was just too stupid to make this thing work, so I threw the whole mess away, and plunked my little guy down in front of the TV. At least there's always Elmo, right?
So what went wrong here? I went back to Hands On As We Grow and this time I read through all the comments. Apparently I'm not the only one this happened to, which means I'm actually NOT dumber than painter's tape (always good to know about one's self, right?). Some people suggested using tissue paper instead of regular paper, others said to try a stickier tape, like duct tape. My suggestion? Keep perusing Pinterest for new ideas, and just don't bother with this one.
I tired this at our Joy School Halloween party but I used the little plastic spiders instead of paper because that made more sense to me and...it worked ok. I think our biggest problem was I put the web in a doorway that we needed to use, so the web was high above their heads so it was difficult. But we got enough to work that the kids were satisfied
ReplyDeleteI would stick painters tape to the wall to protect it from the duct tape I'd use for the web. And a dollar store stuffed animal migt work for things to toss at it...
ReplyDeleteI tried this too, same major flop. I learned that cotton balls stick really well though!
ReplyDeleteI ended up using cotton balls and it worked! I even had a hard time getting the painters tape to stick to the doorway but that's probably because I'm a terrible duster and there was dust build up on the door trim. We tried paper (pretty lightweight paper) and it totally did NOT work. The cotton ball was our only saving grace!
ReplyDeleteAfter the same massive fail as mentioned here (although the students near my room were FASCINATED by what we were doing, so it might have been a win for interest generating purposes), we tweaked it. We put masking tape all across a hula hoop, then put the hula hoop on the blackboard ledge and threw cotton balls. My students at school LOVED it. I can't remember a game they've enjoyed more. Who'd'athunk it?
ReplyDelete