summer journal: plastic cups

August 7th, 2013

summer games and crafts with plastic cups // elsie marley

Pick up a packet of plastic cups at the store and your kids will play happily all afternoon. At least that’s what happened to me. This is just a small sampling of what my kids did with a stack of cups.

summer games and crafts with plastic cups // elsie marley

–building pyramids

–making bombs out of cups to throw at the cup pyramid

summer games and crafts with plastic cups // elsie marley

–jumping cups!

The idea for the jumping cups came from this awesome project from All For the Boys. We were too lazy to make a minion (I need my own minions to do that) and our cups were little so we could just wrap the rubber band around the whole cup, but it’s the same idea. This is an awesome little trick to file away for a rainy day.

summer games and crafts with plastic cups // elsie marley

–jumping cup variations

There were 3, 4, 5 cups jumping at one time. And my son even hooked up two passengers to jump with a cup!

summer games and crafts with plastic cups // elsie marley

–play money

My daughter cut up a few cups, while we were flinging them all over the living room, and made play money. The coins are the bottoms of the cups and the bill is the rest of the cup.

summer games and crafts with plastic cups // elsie marley

–bracelets

She didn’t get my “By the power of Isis” joke, but they are still cool bracelets.

4 Responses to summer journal: plastic cups

  1. AH! Love this! Cups are one of those “keep on hand” items that aren’t toys that are great to bring out on those bored days. Love that you wrapped the rubberband all the way around – so smart. Makes you wonder why we buy toys huh?!

  2. Jenni Bailey says:

    Cute and genius! School starts for us next monday (yay/boo) but I can definitely see us busting out a packet of cups to combat schoolyear weekend boredom just as well!

  3. awfully nice says:

    Ooh! Another fun one is: take a rubber band and tie 4 or 6 strands of yarn to it, spaced evenly around the rubber band. Then you need a hand on each strand (2-3 kids) who need to work together to stretch the rubber band out and use it to lift and stack cups (ie, somehow they have to figure out how to work together to make the rubber band do what they want) = teamwork! They have to do a lot of talking and coordinating. Hope that makes sense, it’s sort of hard to explain.

  4. Jen says:

    So clever! My youngest will love this.