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Paint Like a Robot: Make a palette of finger paint colors on a sheet of wax paper. Give your child (with supervision) small springs, screws, nuts, bolts, old keys and other odd bits of hardware to roll through or dip in the paints and stamp on white or colored paper. Preschoolers may want to make a design, but toddlers are likely to just enjoy the novelty and messy fun.
Robot Sculpture: Assembling your own mini robot is as easy as surfing the junk drawers and hardware bins in your basement or garage. Old or broken remote control devices and cell phones, with all their little buttons, make wonderful robot "bodies." Your child can add watch faces, old clock parts, washers and orphaned dials or knobs with glue to give her robot personality.
Child-size Robots: What child wouldn't love a robot to share her room? Child-sized bots are easy to make. All you need are two square boxes – a larger one for the body and a smaller one for the head – and four pieces of sturdy poster board to roll into tubes for the arms and legs. Cover the boxes in aluminum foil and use silver poster paint for the tubes. Join the pieces with silver duct tape. To add detail, try gold paper fasteners. Punch the fasteners (this is an adult job) through the larger box, in two straight lines – one down the front, the other down the back – for authentic-looking "rivets." Let your child add plastic bottle caps in different colors: an orange "alert" button, a red "danger" light.
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