A Busy Bag Activity

Recently, I put together these "busy bag" sticks so that the kids would have something to do while we are waiting at places like restaurants or doctor's offices or just because it's spring break and I have heard "I'm bored" more often than I should. This was another brilliantly simple idea that I saw on Pinterest. These were easy to put together one evening while watching "The Voice" at the same time. I bought a package of colored craft sticks at Michaels, the large size that resemble tongue depressors, which cost me about $2. I used some round Velcro stick-on tabs that I had at home, plus a new package of square ones from Wal-mart, which cost about $3.80. So, in total, I spent less than $6.00 and I made over 50 of these activity sticks. That is enough for both kids to play with and both kids have enjoyed these! We did lose a handful of the sticky tabs, but it has not made much of a difference in the entertainment factor. Anything that both a three-year-old and a six-year-old agree on is all right by me.

Materials:

• large craft sticks
• scissors
• self-adhesive Velcro tabs
• bag or bin to contain craft sticks

Directions:

1. If using circle Velcro tabs, cut them in half to get more bang for your buck. If using square tabs (I believe mine were 1" squares, but I don't know for sure.), cut them into quarters. I cut mine diagonally to make 4 triangles. If you prefer not to cut the tabs, this will save you time, but you won't be able to make nearly as many activity sticks.
2. Peel the Velcro tabs off of their backing and adhere them to the ends of the craft sticks. The way I did this was to put on "hook" tab on one end of the craft stick and the "loop" tab on the other end. Then, I flipped them over and did the same thing on the other side, only I reversed the positions of the tabs. My belief was that they would be able to do more different types of building activities this way, but who knows, I may just be anal retentive.
3. That's it! Your busy bag is now ready for action. We store ours in a ziplock bag, but you could also use a pencil pouch, pencil box, aluminum can, or whatever else you have that is handy.

{Some building fun!}