Friday, December 7, 2012

Recycled Shrinky dink christmas ornaments

I love to make recycled Shrinky dinks. Its a combination of science, art, recycling fine motor, creativity, advent activity etc combined together. And when we recycle the clamshell boxes, there is a lot of uncertainity which makes the investigation worthwhile.

Let me start from the beginning. For the past several weeks, i have been saving the plastic from clamshell containers - those containers that you get strawberries from and go straight into the landfill after the strawberries are eaten. So we decided to draw and cut out the plastic to make Shrinky dinks.


We did both free hand drawing as well as tracing cartoon figures. Anjali got a kick out of tracing pooh and cartoon kitties
 And colored them using oil pastels
 Recycled clamshell boxes are also great for exploring texture. Here, Anjali is coloring one which was ridged and we were very impressed by how it turned out.
 Sophia didnt want to try any such experiments - she wanted very smooth plastic


 We put them in the oven, at the lowest setting for ten minutes. Here is when things started to get interesting.

Some of the images shrunk, like the tree... and got thick. Like real shrinky dinks
 The ridged pooh, on the other hand turned white
 Here is the tree again
 And a fractal I made
Others curled up.

Now my mission is to find out which of the plastics shrink, which turn white, which curl and why. I may even get an ignobel if I solve it.

This was supposed to be a Monday madness activity, but its been raining all week in the evenings. While I often enjoy playing in the puddles and sliding down with the kids in wet playgrounds (Ever tried sliding in a slippery and wet slide? its a must to do thing), other parents obviously have concerns with their kids walking around with wet bottoms and tend to avoid playgrounds on wet evenings.

1 comment:

  1. Mud, dirt, beware of geeeerms :)

    Do you put the plastic to the same oven you cook your food in? I'd be more concerned about that than mud.

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