Kid Activity: Indoors Recycled Tumbling Fun

Here’s a fun way to make a cool indoor activity out of recycled goods. Perfect for winter boredom.

Project: Recycled tumbling friend.

You will need:

1. Felt of any color (scraps will work).
2. Glue and or tape
3. Scrap of poster board — really the trick is you need thick paper material that can be rolled. You could use thin cardboard too.
4. A 1/2 inch in diameter steel ball. You can get one at your local auto repair shop — ask for an old, worn wheel bearing ball. Any heavy ball will work. It does need to be heavy though so a marble (no).
5. Markers — permanent are best.

Instructions:

1. Form a cylinder out of the poster board. The cylinder should be about 2 1/2 to 3 inches long. You can make it any size, I suppose, but I’ve never tried longer than 3 inches. It should be just round enough to go around your ball bearing. Tape it together well.
2. Cut out two poster board circles and glue or tape one to one end of your cylinder.
3. Put the ball bearing inside the tube, and tape or glue on the other circle.
4. To make the “friend” part cut a body out of felt that can either wrap around the cylinder or try the hole method (see picture below).
5. Insert the tube into the friend felt or wrap the cylinder.

Place your little tumbling friend on the floor and let the fun tumbling start. So, I don’t have a picture of how to do this which means I have to draw you some. Yikes. We made actual friends a while back but forgot to take pictures.

This first picture illustrates the tube set up:

Here is the felt set-up. You can cut the felt to resemble a dress or shirt and pants. You fold a bit over at the top which is where the tube fits in.

The final tumbling friend!: I added green felt hair to my friend and little cardboard hands and feet. You can make your friend any way you want. You could even make tumbling animals, dinosaurs, or flowers.

Acrobatic toys are rumored to have originated in China but that’s really only a guess. Many cultures have created their own version of this toy through the ages.