Recycled Robot Art Project

I'm a little late posting this but I wanted to share. This year, Jaxon's teacher sent home a project for the class to complete in conjunction with Earth Day.

Students were asked to start saving boxes, paper towel and toilet paper rolls, cardboard, aluminum cans, plastic, and any other recyclable materials they could think of to create a robot. His teacher taught a whole unit on how to take care of the environment by reducing, reusing, and recycling.

This is the robot that Jaxon came up with:

Once we started saving recycled materials, the robot just sort of took shape by himself. As you can see, this particular robot is a cowboy-themed robot. The deciding factor in that theme was the individual Pringles container, which looked like a cowboy hat when turned upside-down. From there, we added a horse sticker to one of his buttons and glued on a plastic star. To recreate this look, follow these steps:

Materials

2 egg cartons (dozen size)

1 64 oz juice bottle (flat sided)

2 toilet paper rolls

1 pot-sized spaghetti box

1 8 oz. cashew container lid

1 individual Pringles container

6 various color plastic bottle caps from various containers (shown here from spice container, juice bottle, Gatorade, water bottles, lemon juice bottle)

2 bottle caps from glass bottles

1 plastic star (this was from a broken Christmas decoration)

1 black styrofoam tray

1 pencil

Scissors

1 horse sticker

Letter and number stickers (to label project)

hot glue gun and hot glue sticks

1. Glue the flat side of the egg cartons to either side of the bottom of the juice bottle.
2. Glue the toilet paper rolls above the egg cartons to represent arms.
3. Glue the bottle caps to larger plastic caps. Once dry, glue them onto the spaghetti box for eyes. Glue another plastic cap underneath the eyes for a nose.
4. Draw a mustache shape onto the black styrofoam tray and cut out. Glue onto the nose. Attach the spaghetti box to the cap of the juice bottle.
5. Glue the cashew lid to the top of the spaghetti box. Glue the Pringles container upside down on top of the cashew lid.
6. Glue the remaining plastic caps onto the flat front of the juice bottle to represent buttons. Attach the horse sticker to one of the buttons. Glue the plastic star to the upper chest.
7. Label your robot on the back with letter and number stickers if desired. We named ours the Jaxon-Tron 8808. (Jaxon's birthday is 8/8/08.)

And here's the final robot with Jaxon to show about how large it turned out. Not too shabby for a project made with recycled materials.