Paddle Fan – Craft Ideas for Summer

It is summer vacations for my daughter and they go on for two months (yeah, I am not joking – a two-month long summer vacation!). The task for me for these two months is to ‘entertain’ her, from morning all the way to night.

Little B is a toddler and needless to say her attention span isn’t so great. Apart from that she is extremely vocal. If she is bored, she will say it out loudly. There is no way I can get her to cooperate with me if she doesn’t want to. Keeping her busy is the biggest challenge that I will be facing for these two months. So I am trying my best to find activities that she can do and love (fingers crossed!).

Searching through various summer craft ideas on the internet, I found this paddle fan craft making activity. It requires things that can be usually found in the home and I was good to go.

You Would Need

Cereal box

Ice cream stick or craft stick

Glue (something a little strong to stick craft stick and cereal box together)

Pencil, Scissors, Paint/Crayons

How to Go About It

Undo all the seams of the box or cut wherever required so that you get a flat cardboard by the end of it.

Cut this cardboard into half and then further halves so that you get something like this.

Basically we will be using two one-fourth pieces of the box. As we will be holding the paddle fan through the ice cream stick or the craft stick, we don’t want the fan to get bigger than that.

Turn the cardboard around over to the clean side.

Now draw an object on one of the cardboard pieces. For balance sake, please ensure that the design is long horizontally. It could be a bus, or a car or a butterfly or a tool box, possibilities are endless.

Hold the two pieces together with a paper clip (glossy sides inside and clean sides outside) and cut your drawn shape.

Cover one glossy side with glue. Place the stick in the center of the cardboard with a little more than half of it peeping out.  Place the other glossy side right on top of the glue covered side and press them together.

You can dry up the fan by keeping it under a heavy book for a couple of hours.

Color your fan whichever way you want.

Little B is into finger painting these days so that’s how she did it.

One side of the paddle fan had this bus drawn on it and the other side was empty. I wrote ‘Paddle Fan’ there to add the word to Little B’s visual dictionary (well, can I stop teaching her for once!).

 It was her own creation (mostly), so Little B loved it. She is been fanning with it for days now. The paddle fan is still lying on top of her table and not in her toy drawer. That is how I measure my success!

(Republished post)

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