Who knew that a box full of plastic straws could keep kids busy for hours, and I'm talking hours on end!
With the weather being as it is over these holidays I upended the box in front of my two crafti testers one morning and left them to it. These straws come with lots of little connector points which join all the straws together. Before long they had built a jail big enough for them crawl into. It even had a flag on the top.
Dad ventured home around lunchtime, and immediately joined in the action. Not to be outdone by the jail his children had constructed, he proceeded to built a rather large tower with a triple helix as it's support structure, he had to climb to the top of the stairs to continue building the top of this tower. Spot the engineer!
My three testers then made a rocket, some large balls, and the next morning I came down to find the lounge being turned into a zoo!.... They had constructed a large zoo entrance which you could walk through, along with cubes containing animals (granted these were stuffed animals, but animals none the less) scattered around the room. I had to pay money to enter the zoo/lounge of course, it's lucky we had being playing Monopoly the night before, I managed to convince the kids that $1,000,000 note in Monopoly money was a fair enough entry fee. It was that or chocolate and I'm not one to share my chocolate!
If you were looking at the learning aspect of these straws and connectors, our kids spent hours using their imagination and creative thinking to build different shapes. They worked on their fine motor skills and hand eye co-ordination, which for our 4 year old, is something we're focusing on with him at the moment. Overall Blog, they are a lot of fun. The kids come back to them time and time again, creating new shapes to build.
