Space Station Craft

My oldest son and I made this space station craft today!  The inspiration for this came from a Family Fun article that someone e-mailed to us (it was scanned pages, and I’m not sure what issue it was!), but we ended up making so many changes that our final product is not much like the Family Fun craft!

We covered a shoe box in tin foil to make the space station.  I covered a small piece of styrofoam with foil to be the “control panel.”  We added construction paper buttons to the control panel.  We labeled one of our buttons “shoot.”  I told Aidan that we could pretend that when we push that button, the nerf toy on top of the space station fires at enemies (it really does shoot plastic darts).  He said, “Oooooh, good idea!”  It’s fun to be able to come up with something simple, and he thinks it’s amazing.  I’m sure those days are numbered…

We made this robot from an empty medicine bottle topped with a spray bottle cap.  We cut out Aidan’s face from a photo to make him the robot!  We had both pipe cleaner arms and legs at first, but Aidan wanted the robot to stand up by himself, so we hot glued him to the bottom of a broken toy car. Now he can roll!

Aidan wanted to make this box into a space ship for his Aqua Man toy that we got at McDonald’s.  First, we had to cover up the “pull-ups” logo, and make it a little more “space” looking…

Duct tape to the rescue!

Aqua Man can now travel in style.

Now I’m sure that someone with more crafting ability could make a space station that looks a lot better!  Aidan was not really into the details – he just wanted to get on to playing!  It was fun project, though, and he and his brother spent a good 45 minutes playing with the space station afterwards with all of their super hero figures.  I’ll count that a success!