Activities & Days Out / 28 July, 2020 / Nanny Anita

Make Your Own Mini Bow and Arrow Set

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I’ve probably said it before, but EC loves anything that shoots something; his favourite games normally involve him being a policeman or spy with his weapon of choice. I can’t say I am always thrilled at constantly being shot at, but it does make him really happy and we always have an absolute blast doing it. Therefore I try every now and then to do some sort of activity that will really appeal to this side of EC (made pom pom shooters before). This time we made time we made mini bows and arrows using popsicle sticks and ear buds. They are fiddly to make and take a bit of getting use to shooting, but my goodness they are fun and they really go far. Needless to say we spent an afternoon firing at mini targets and pretending we were Robin Hood.

You will need:

• Popsicle sticks
• Dental floss
• Ear Buds
• Knife
• Scissors
• Paper

On each end of your popsicle sticks carve a set of small grooves; you should have 4, 2 on each end.

You can just about see the grooves on them.

To make the popsicle sticks more pliable you will need to let them soak in water for at least an hour, if you don’t do this your sticks will just snap when you try to bend them. A word of caution; be careful if you are using coloured popsicle sticks as the dye will run and stain everything, it took me about a day to get the blue colour off of my fingers.

When your popsicle stick is ready tie dental floss around one end of your stick (it should sit in the grooves) and then gentle bend your stick into a bow shape and tie the dental floss to the other end. This needs to be tight, or the popsicle stick will straighten and you will loose the tension in the string.

Cut the bud off one end of the ear bud and then put a little slit in that end.

To finish off our Robin Hood ensemble we made quivers to hold our arrows and a small bulls eye to practice hitting. I must say Robin Hood wouldn’t have been impressed with our abilities, because we didn’t even come close to hitting the target, we did however have a great deal of fun and YC managed to shoot one of her arrows half way across the room!

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