Feelin' crafty: stringing apples.

We had TONS of leftover colored pastas from our pasting pasta apples project yesterday. So, we combined a fun craft with fine motor skills work, and let them use the pasta to "string" an apple.

We started the project a long yellow pipe cleaner (the body of the apple), half a green pipe cleaner (the leaf), and a smaller tan pipe cleaner (for the stem, and brown would be a better choice).  I gave them each a handful of round yellow pastas, and a handful of round red pastas.  Make sure these are small enough that you'll still be able to bend the pipecleaners in a circle to make an apple shape (you could also use beads here).  At the last moment, I gave them long greenish pasta, too (in case they wanted to string those to make the leaf).

I didn't ask them to make a pattern or to use only one color, but you could if you wanted.  These tiny pastas were a good challenge to get onto the pipe cleaners - not too difficult, but not too easy, either.  

Stringing pasta, stringing pasta, stringing pasta.... it takes a while! 

Done stringing!  Bigger Bit used all yellow pastas. 

Bub made sure to cover his pipecleaner from end to end (so much so that I had to take a bit off to get it around, actually).

The Princess finished early and used her waiting time to string pasta onto the leaf pipe cleaner, because "stringing pasta is so much fun!". 

They had to take turns with this next part, because they all needed help.  We made the pipecleaners with the red and yellow pastas into circles (for apples), then bent the green pipecleaners into a (very approximate) leaf shape, and attached that to the apple.

Then we attached the stem piece (again, why didn't we use brown?  I have no idea!).

And, finished.  Bead stringing apples!  

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