My 3-year old was driving me c-r-a-z-y yesterday. She didn’t want to read, didn’t want to go outside, didn’t want to do puzzles, didn’t want to do anything except whine at me. So, in desperation, I picked up a favorite activity book and let it randomly open to an activity. And voila! Tin Foil!

What I love best about this activity is that it requires absolutely nothing special in terms of supplies other than tin foil. And we all have tin foil. Luckily Katie found it lots of fun and it got her out of my hair for about 20 minutes.

Core Activity: Foil Wrapping

• Age appropriateness: 18 months & up
• Materials needed: a roll of tin foil and any random collection of little things (harder, solid things work best)
• Preparation time: 2 minutes to tear off strips of tin foil about 6″ long and then cut in half

Activity: Go around the house and gather up any small, hardish items that are age appropriate for your kids. I grabbed a couple of wooden blocks, wooden shapes, a toy truck and even a random old gift card. Stick the pile of objects in front of your kids, along with some tin foil squares and tell them to wrap the objects up in the tin foil.

I figured this would be too dull or too quick of an activity, but I was pleasantly surprised with how much Katie enjoyed this. This combined Katie’s extreme love of wrapping things with exploring a new material that she hadn’t really played with before. She even enjoyed unwrapping everything and trying to smooth out the tin foil wrinkles.

I think she would have wrapped for hours but I was eventually unwilling to let her use up the entire role of foil.

Read.

• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: A Commemorative Pop-up by L. Frank Baum (I know the Tin Man is a stretch, but I just didn’t find anything else suitable.)

Eat.

• Present your kids’ meal entirely wrapped in tin foil. They will get to unwrap each food like a little gift.

Explore.

• Google Images: it’s hysterical that the image that pops up the most is people/animals wearing tin foil hats to ward off the government from reading their thoughts…
• Wikipedia

Create.

• Why not have your kids create tin foil hats of their own?

As always, please comment with additional tin foil activities and/or ideas for future posts!