Creativity 521 #87 - My little archers {DIY bow and arrows}

So, the little girl drew an archer during her art class and it gave me an inspiration to make something easy but fun for the kids in this week's Creativity 521 - DIY Bow and Arrows!

I personally like games that need aiming and precision and I realised that the big girl probably has that same gene because she was very much into target shooting games when we went visiting during CNY last month. Thus, I thought it would be pretty cool to let them become little archers and better still, make use of it to play some learning games too! Here's what we did.

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Materials used:

1) Balloon sticks
2) Straws
3) Elastic string
4) Thin cardboard
5) Glue
6) Washi tape
7) Scissors
8) Pencil
9) Ruler

Firstly, thread the elastic string through the balloon stick.

Pull both ends of the string hard so that the stick forms a curve and tie them together. Make sure the knot is secure.

Cut away the ends and shift the string such that the knot becomes hidden inside the stick. There, we have a nice little bow!

Using the cardboard, cut out shapes for the front and back of your arrows. Repeat by tracing and cutting for as many as you need.

Glue the shapes onto the arrows as shown above. I realised that glue will not suffice to hold them in place especially after you start playing, so my next bet will be to stick some washi tape to secure them and make the arrows more sturdy.



The designs of the washi tape also makes the arrows look prettier, don't you think so too?

Use a sharp pair of scissors to make two slits, one on top and on bottom, at the end of each straw. This is the part where the bow string is inserted so that you can pull back and shoot.

Just to up the fun factor, we also made use of felt to make quivers, or arrow bags. To save time and hassle, instead of sewing, we simply cut out a rectangular piece of felt, stuck the width and bottom together and attached a long strip on the left and right sides of the opening. I find that using a double-sided tape is good enough as the arrows are lightweight.

Ta-dah! My little archers are all set for some fun!

I was initially a little skeptical about the arrows and told the girls that "Maybe the arrows will fly a bit only, ok?" Surprisingly, as soon as they learnt to pull back and release properly, they managed to shoot the arrows quite a distance away! In fact, Angel's arrow went missing twice because she had no idea where it landed. Haha.


Anyway, instead of shooting aimlessly or aiming for score targets, I decided to do something more educational. I printed out chinese numbers from 1-10 since I was trying to teach Ariel to recognise these words. To turn them into flash cards, I cut and laminated them one by one and stuck them using blu-tack to the wall. So, the idea is simple, she just had to aim and hit the number that I read out!

As for the big girl, of course, I couldn't let her miss out on the fun too. So, considering that she's been learning subtraction and addition, we used math sums to let her decide which number to hit. I purposely made use of two-digit numbers like "What is 29 - 22?" as she's been finding it a challenge to understand the concept. Well, I hope we can play more games as we go along! I think it will be definitely be fun to let them learn about shapes, colours, alphabets, spelling, phonics and word recognition through archery!

For more crafts and DIY ideas, visit my gallery here.