Make an aquarium from a shoebox

What you need:

• 1 shoebox
• Acrylic paint in blue
• paint brush
• old newspapers or wax tablecloth
• colored pencils
• scissors
• Glue
• 1 thick needle
• small wooden beads
• White paper
• Possibly. a hot glue gun
• Cotton thread
• Stones (approx. 5 cm in diameter)
• possibly a few branches
• Shellfish
• some sand or fine gravel

Except for working with the hot glue gun, the children can almost independently build the aquarium in the shoebox.

Prepare the shoe box:

1. Cover the table with the old newspapers or the wax tablecloth so that you can Handcraft no paint or glue comes on the table.
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2. Take the shoebox on the mat and use the blue paint to paint the bottom and the two short and one long inner side blue.
3. Set the box on its side to allow the paint to dry.

Now it's time to do handicrafts for the inhabitants of the aquarium:

1. Take a piece of paper and draw the outlines of fish in different shapes - thick, round or long narrow - as you or your child like it best. The fish should not be larger than 5 - 7 cm.


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2. Now paint the fish in different colors.
3. Now the colored fish are cut out.
4. If you like, you can also draw grass and water plants, paint them green and cut them out as well.

The setup of the aquarium:

1. Place the shoebox on the table with the unpainted inner surface facing down.
2. Apply glue to the unpainted area.
3. Now sprinkle the sand or fine gravel on the sticky surface - this will be the bottom of the aquarium.
4. Now take some of the stones and glue them to the sandy surface, preferably near the back wall. You can do this with regular glue, but hot glue will hold better.
5. Attach some seashells to the ground and to the stones. Again, hot glue is more durable than regular glue.
6. If you want, you can glue in one or two of the small branches. The best ones here are those that have been lying on the ground a little longer and are therefore bleached and without bark. If the branches are a little crooked and fork a little, they look nicer.
7. If you have tinkered some more grass or plants, you can bend them around a centimeter wide at the bottom and attach them behind the stones to the bottom of the aquarium. Of course, you can also stick a few of the plants on the back wall.
8. Apply a little glue and sand to the visible glued areas of the plants on the bottom of the aquarium so that the areas become invisible.

The residents are now moving into the aquarium:

1. Place your tinkered fish on the table in front of you and use the thick needle to drill a hole into the fish as a hanging loop. Try to place the holes so that the fish are straight when they are hanging.
2. Now thread a thread that is approx. 20 cm long through each fish.
3. Use the needle to drill holes through the top side of the box from above. The number of holes should match the number of fish you have made.
4. Thread the cords that the fish are attached to through the holes from below.
5. Now take a small wooden bead for each string and run a thread through each bead.
6. Knot the thread with the bead. The length of the entire thread should be adjusted so that the fish hang in the aquarium at different heights.

The aquarium is now ready. When it is on the shelf and a slight breeze of air passes the auarium, the fish "swim" around the pool merrily.