The Oyster and the Pearl
What are your thoughts on Oysters? Do you love them, hate them, never tried them or just plain indifferent? I never was a huge fan, I thought they were a little too slimy and booger like to put it bluntly, which is really quite odd considering my love for steamers. This summer though, after our 50th trip to Island Creek Oysters in Duxbury I decided to try them and now I see what I’ve been missing! Today just so happens to be National Oyster Day, but it’s also raining here on the South Shore so we turned my craving for oysters into a fun rainy day activity.
First I should say both kids loved making these, but no one more than my littlest one. She must have eaten her entire bowl of Fruit Loops before putting any on the pipe cleaner. Once she realized what the intended purpose of the cereal was though she got the hang of it.
There were a few supplies here, most of which you’d most likely have even if you have a smaller craft area. The only thing I was missing was the all important pearls, so we needed to grab them before we could begin. If you have a love for oysters, or sea creatures in general you’ll have a blast making these, I know we sure did!
Supplies: paper plates, pipe cleaners, fruit loops, paint, construction paper, googley eyes, scissors and glue
The first thing we did was string up our fruit loops so grab a handful and a pipe cleaner and have at it! Make sure you put a couple extra down because your kids, or maybe yourself, maybe start sneaking a piece or two of the sugary snack! Once you’re done making this portion you can set it aside, this will act as the “pearl” that will go inside the oyster when its completed!
Next we started on our oyster shell. I used two paper plates each, that way I could have them continue to paint one while the other one dried. You could definitely cut back to one plate though if you wanted and/or use crayons or markers too if you’d like. After they finished painting both plates we set them aside to dry and worked on cutting out the tongues we’d be using for inside the oysters mouths with the construction paper. If you don’t have toddler friendly scissors you’ll definitely want to be the one cutting them out, but my kids really do enjoy learning how to cut! At this point we also decided on which googley-eyes we wanted to use and placed them with the tongues until everything was ready.
Fast forward an hour or two and the plates are now dry (enough) for me to handle so I glued the two of them together, added the tongue inside and the eyes to the top then grabbed the pearls and viola, the Oyster and their pearl came together!
