My Earth Day Project

My Sprouts leader wants everybody to think of an idea to make something useful out of something that might go in the garbage. For our Earth Day celebration, our parents are going to be invited to see all the things that we have made. Grampa is helping me with this blog today because it’s hard to explain. He also helped me build my project.

We collect bottle caps. We’ve got a big coffee can with a lid. Every time we find a bottle cap we put it in there. We collect metal caps and plastic caps. Nobody wants them in the recycling box. Grampa says we’re going to find some good ways of using them.

Grampa thought of an idea to make a checkerboard out of a cereal box and use some of bottle caps for the checkers. You need 24 plastic bottle caps. 12 of one colour and 12 of another colour. We didn’t have enough black ones. We had enough blue and white ones.

I used a big cereal box and cut out the two big sides. Grampa helped me measure each piece  so that the were both 30 cm long and 15 cm wide. I cut the pieces as straight as I could. Then we fitted the two long sides together really carefully and put tape on the printed side of the cardboard to hold the two sides together. Then we had a square that was big enough for the checkerboard.

Grampa helped me put a tick every 3 cm on the board all the way around. Then we took a ruler and made straight lines joining up the ticks on opposite sides. When we were finished, we had 100 squares in all. But Grampa says a checkerboard has only 64 squares so I used my felt markers and I drew a flower in every square around the border. That made it look nice.

The next part is hard. I took a black felt marker and I started at the bottom left hand side. I coloured the whole first square black as carefully as I could. Then I left one square plain and coloured the next square black. I left the next square plain and coloured the next square black. My last square I left plain. 

Then for every plain square, I coloured the square above it black. Then I moved to the next row and did the same thing. I coloured the square above each plain square black until I had coloured in the whole board. You have to be careful because it’s easy to get mixed up. If you colour the wrong square you can fix it by pasting a piece of cardboard over top. This is my finished checkerboard! Grampa says it’s the nicest one he’s ever seen.

I play checkers with Grampa. You can also play connect 4 with a checkerboard! You just have to start from the bottom and your pieces can only go on an empty square that is on top of another piece. You need some more bottle caps to play connect 4, but it’s ok because we have lots more. It’s fun!