Making a winch and putting on a show!

My preschooler has been begging me to ‘make a show’ for a few days now after watching the CBeebies show ‘Bitz and Bob’. Upon further quizzing, what he meant was he wanted to make a show curtain that could be taken up and down, and put on a show for me. So that’s what we did!

For this you will need –

• Glue, sellotape, scissors
• Megabloks (or duplo/other blocks)
• Craft sticks
• Wrapping paper – we used a roll of robot paper
• Kitchen roll
• Loo roll
• Foil
• Playdough (or blue tack would also do)

We first made the reel for the curtain by cutting two circles out of a piece of card (wider in diameter than the kitchen roll) and glueing them to the kitchen roll. We then cut the loo roll in half (so as to form two mini loo rolls), and with each half, we cut it in half the other way (so as to form two open mini rolls). We then covered these in foil. We use these to rest the curtain reel in.

We then cut a craft stick in half, and stuck it to one outside end of the reel using glue – this will be the handle. We put the reel aside to dry. Whilst the reel was drying, we made the characters for our show. The wrapping paper we used was robots (my son is obsessed with robots!), so we cut out some robots from the paper and stuck them onto the end of craft sticks to be our characters. Next, we built up two towers for the reel to rest in. We used megablocks, but any stable (and preferably inter-locking) blocks would do.

Whilst my son was building the towers, I cut out a long thin piece of wrapping paper to be the curtain. Make sure it is thinner than the length of the kitchen roll. Then sellotape one end to the kitchen roll. At the other end, get two craft sticks and place them near to the edge. Fold them in and sellotape them shut to provide a weight for your curtain. Now take the loo roll pieces covered in foil, and use the playdough to stick them, one on top of each tower.

Now you’re ready to roll up your curtain, and put it into its holder –

Then let your kid have fun putting on a show for you! My son played with this for well over an hour when we had made it. He thought it was fantastic! The robots got up to all sorts of adventures!