This week’s unplug your kids’ challenge was “Cylinder”.

The kids’ school has a lovely wooden set of cylinders that you shake and match up. I saw those, and saw how much fun they both were having with them and decided we could make a set at home with those mini m&m containers.

containers

Materials:
* An equal amount of mini m&m tubes in two different colors (I didn’t realize that they have little characters embossed on the tops and just happened to grab one of each, but if you really want your tubes to match, you’ll have to keep an eye out for that)
* Various little things to put inside to make rattling sounds
* Hot glue to glue it shut if you’re letting little ones use them

Step One.
Remove the m&m covers and any remaining glue residue

Step Two.
shakers

Gather a bunch of materials to put inside. You’ll need to have enough to put inside two tubes, one of each color.  We had fun looking for items that were made from different materials such as: wood, plastic, metal, organic and so on.

Step 3.
fill

Fill the tubes with equal amounts of the shaking goodies and then test the sound. You’ll probably want to have a nice variety of sounds, but if you want to make things difficult than you could have slightly different sounds too. Surprisingly we discovered that mini jingle bells didn’t sound nice when enclosed in the plastic, and the quacking sound maker from a toy didn’t work as it needed air flow to make a nice sound. So make sure you test your sounds before you move on to the next step.

test

Step 4
An adult glues the lids shut with a hot glue gun.

Step 5
match
Shake! Match! Put them in your mouth (that idea’s from Jayden, I don’t really recommend it)