Beaded Bubble Wands

Bubbles! Beads! Wands! Woo hoo! This is a great summer project, and I can’t take any credit for it at all, I got it straight from The Artful Parent: Make Beaded Bubble Wands, and really, you should just go read her blog because her pictures are much better! I need to stop being so lazy with my iPhone and use my real camera. And also she is just one of my favorite kid-art-project-bloggers ever! Her blog probably got me started with Rebecca’s art group ages ago. I guess I owe her!

This project was a great excuse to get out all our beads. Unfortunately all our beads didn’t fit very well on pipe cleaners, but no one had a melt down! Phew. We kept a spare container on the table to throw all of the offending beads into, to keep from trying them over, and over, and over, and over.

Oh, 10 second project summary: Put some beads on a pipe cleaner, twist it into a loop, wrap the ends around a dowel and hot glue it on so it doesn’t fly off when you are waving it around. ANd make bubbles. Don’t forget to make bubbles!

Like any project involving beads it’s a great fine motor skills workout. It’s also nice, because the project works whether you fill the pipe cleaner up with beads, or whether you only have the patience to put just one single bead on. Actually, I found if we filled them up with large glass beads they felt a little too floppy, the pipecleaner isn’t quite stiff enough. I tried to encourage the kids to either mix up the plastic beads and glass beads to make them lighter, or make them a little smaller if they were only glass beads so they would have better ‘action’, even if that is a funny thing to say about bubble wands! They do still work fine if they are a bit floppy though.

I tried to use a forked stick to make a wand, but that one didn’t work as well, perhaps because the edge of the bubble membrane was partly up against rough bark? I don’t know. There’s a science experiment in there, but I don’t have time for it!