Last year we attended our first homeschool Valentine’s Day and it was so much fun! All of the families in attendance contributed to the party in some way. One child made a fun play list and the kids had a dance party complete with light show. Another mom coordinated all the food and of course there were fun and educational games to be played. The highlight of the party was of course the Valentine Boxes and passing out of valentines. Now our homeschool group is pretty big and we needed to bring roughly 60-75 valentines! Each kiddo brings their DIY Valentine Box and they line them all up and the kids go down the rows stuffing their treats, cards and trinkets inside. In the weeks leading up to the party we thought about all the ideas we had for John’s valentine box and we finally decided on a Robot Valentine Box. So you know that means it was time for mom to start drawing up the plans.
Here are the things you are going to need to make your Robot Valentine Box:
Two cardboard boxes that are the proportion to size robot valentine box you want to make (I used amazon boxes)
1 Foam pool Noodle (Target and Dollar Tree sell these year round)
Hot glue gun and low temp glue
Silver Metallic wrapping paper
Misc. Colors of Astrobright paper
Start by wrapping box of your boxes in the silver wrapping paper and securing. On your smaller box, you will need to cut a small rectangle, on the largest surface space of the box, approximately 1.5″ x 4″ with you x-acto knife (this will serve as the robot’s mouth). On the side of the box closest to this cut a matching rectangle. Position the head of your robot on the body and using a pen trace the opening. Now cut the box serving as your body with the same size rectangle. These will all line up to serve as the mouth of the robot valentine box that will feed into the body of the robot to collect all of your valentines.
Gather your hot glue gun, robot body, pool noodle and air duct hose. Cut the pool noodle the length of the legs you desire (these will offer the structural integrity under the duct hose). Once you have them you can hot glue them to the body of the robot with low temp hot glue. After you secure the pool noodles you can cut the air ducting the same length and hot glue the edge to the body encompassing the pool noodle. For the feet you will need approximately 4″ long piece of pool noodle cut in half long ways and glued to the edge of the pool noodle leg and duct hose.
The arms are hot glued air duct hose with the same pool noodle hands as the feet were attached.
Attach the head (smaller box) with hot glue, aligning all of the cut out rectangles to flow together.
Now you can attach google eyes, antennas and design an knobs or buttons for the front of your robot, we used Astrobright paper and kept it simple adding John’s name on the heart of his robot. For the ears we covered the craft tube in astrobright paper and cut 1/2″ sections, attaching them to the side of the head.
To remove your Valentines you can simple cut a “door” flap on the back of your robot to remove you valentines.
We saved our robot and a few months later reused him as the Pinata at John’s Robot themed 5th birthday party!
