It’s dinner time and the peas are flying! Can your land the pom-pom peas on the plates, bowls, and cups? Bust out your pea catapult and get ready to do some physics and math!
We recommend reading Eat Your Peas, Ivy Louise by Leo Landry (HMH Books, 2005). Toddler Ivy Louise has been tasked with eating her dinner. However, those energetic peas are running a full-scale circus on her plate, complete with acrobatics, impressive weight-lifting, and a high dive act. The grand finale? We’ll let you guess. Very entertaining for Ivy Louise. Not so much fun for Mom and Dad to clean up!
You’ll need:
- 2 jumbo craft sticks (ours were 8″ long)
- 6 medium craft sticks (mine were 4.5″ long)
- Masking tape
- 4 medium rubber bands
- 1 plastic spoon
- 5-10 green pom-poms
- Paper plates, bowl, and cup
- Markers for decorating
Our awesome craft stick catapult is from this bouncing bedtime post, so I’ve repeated the instructions below. Stack 2 jumbo craft sticks on top of one another, then wrap a rubber band tightly around one side.
Now stack 6 medium craft sticks on top of one another and wrap both ends tightly with masking tape.
Wedge the stack of 6 craft sticks in between the jumbo crafts sticks like so:
Then wrap 2 rubber bands around both sets of craft sticks to secure the catapult mechanism in place (a criss-cross formation works best).
An additional step for you pea catapult…secure a plastic spoon on the end of the catapult arm with a rubber band. Don’t secure the spoon with tape – you might want to adjust the placement of the spoon later when you’re launching peas. Here’s our finished pea catapult, all loaded up:
Now for your targets! Use markers to decorate paper plates, bowls, and cups. Make sure to assign a numerical value to each item.
Ready to play? Set your table, load up your catapult, and launch some peas! Use your math skills to tally points, and play around with physics as you adjust your spoon and your catapult to achieve maximum results.
At $8.50 a pop, they can get pricey, especially if you’re doing this project with multiple kids. However, you can find them for a couple bucks cheaper on Amazon. The important thing to keep in mind is the length of the motor’s shaft (i.e. the part that the clock hands slide on to). The shafts can range anywhere from .25″ to 1″. For this project, you want to aim for the shorter shafts. Otherwise, your clock hands will stick pretty far out of your cardboard clock base. Also pay attention to the lengths of the clock hands. You don’t want them to extend past the body of your clock.
Next, place a piece of tagboard and a circle of white card stock over the hole, then redrill the hole. The circle is your clock face, and the tagboard piece elevates the clock face a little bit.
Before you glue the tagboard and the clock face to the lid, however, you’ll want to use markers to add numbers and decoration to your clock face. Check out these awesome clock faces. The smiling kitty!
When your clock face is finished, glue it to your clock. Then start adding a bunch of tagboard flourishes. We cut a bunch of different shapes and styles of flourishes, and let the kids decide what they wanted to use on their clocks. The more layers and texture, the better it looks.
You can also use markers to decorate the clock. We offered Crayola metallic markers, and the results were fantastic.
When all the decorating is done, install the clock movement. Just follow the instructions on the packaging, add a battery (a single AA), and you’re done!
Tap the pendulum to watch it swing back and forth. Eventually, it winds down and comes to a stop, but while it’s swinging, the illusion of a working clock is quite real!
Families entering the theater were greeted by a table covered with postcards (I found a pack of 92 vintage postcards at the thrift store for for $4 woot!) and a big world map.
Kids were invited to select a postcard and write their name and address on it. Then, they put the postcard in the red mailbox for a chance to win a stuffed animal of Snowy, Tintin’s faithful canine companion. Katie modeled the mailbox after the ones she saw in Brussels (birthplace of Tintin!). Isn’t it awesome? It has pom-pom feet!
Next to the postcard table was a big map (50″ x 32″) mounted on foam board:
Katie selected some cool Tintin location images from the various volumes and attached them to the map. A line and a flag showed the actual location on the map.
During the event, kids were invited to add pushpin flags on locations they had traveled to. As it turns out, our crowd was pretty well traveled! Iceland, Australia, India, Thailand, Costa Rica, China, Hawaii, South Korea, Europe…
Around the corner from the postcard and map table were 2 additional activities: A Tintin head band with the iconic hair flip, and a pull-along box Snowy. The box Snowy was a 2″ x 4″ x 4″ 
Notice the little Captain Haddock key chains they’re holding up? Those were part of a trivia contest we were running. Our Tintin expert had a couple key chains on hand to give to kids who correctly guessed Snowy’s original name in the comics (which were first published in French).
In honor of Snowy, we also had a very, very special performance. A live dog show provided by 
Bill Berloni is a Tony-Award winner with decades of experience training animals. In fact, he trained the very first Sandy for the original production of Annie. He and his apprentice, Andy, brought 3 dogs – Marti, who plays Sandy in Annie (and this was the Sandy from the 2014 movie!), Nessa, who plays Toto in The Wizard of Oz, and Bowdie, who plays Winn-Dixie in Because of Winn-Dixie. Above is Bowdie. Below is Marti, waiting with Andy to go on stage:
And here’s Nessa, the cutest, most enthusiastic Toto ever, racing down the aisle:
Bill shared a little of his history, his training techniques, and the rescue stories of each of the dogs. There were plenty of demonstrations too, both on and off the leash. The thing that shone through the most however? How happy the dogs are, how much they love working with Bill, and what a tremendous advocate he is for rescue animals. He’s truly amazing. He’s also an author! After the event, he gave me a copy of his heart-warming book, Broadway Tails: Heartfelt Stories of Rescue Dogs Who Became Showbiz Superstars (Lyons Press, 2008), which has a foreword by Bernadette Peters.
