under the sea | Today We Did

We made our own version of Pin the Tail on the Donkey for our beach themed party; Pin the Tentacle on the Octopus!

Using a piece of scrap cardboard, I painted an octopus with only seven tentacles. I gave her a lovely big smile, and A thought she should have a little crown too. We used some glittery paint for extra effect.

Streamer tentacles.

While the octopus was drying we cut some lengths of crepe paper streamers up in various colours to use as the missing tentacle. Each child could choose one, and using a piece of blu-tack on the back of the streamer, stick it to the octopus picture during the game.

I’m sure most of you have played a version of this game at some point, but if not, it is played like this; each child stands in front of the picture, is then blind-folded and spun around gently three times before trying to stick or pin the tail/tentacle onto the picture. The child that gets their tentacle closest to where it’s meant to be is the winner. A scarf tied around the child’s eyes can suffice for a blindfold.

Example of where to place the tentacle.

This is a fun game for younger children and can be done with as many players as there are available tentacles (or tails).

These wonderful jelly-fish were made using a paper bowl and scraps of various yarns, cotton, and ribbons. The ribbons were all collected from gifts we had been given for birthdays last year and were just sitting in the craft box awaiting their final purpose. It’s great when we can re-use something like that in our craft pursuits.

Painting the top of the jelly-fish.

We ended up making three jelly-fish. First we painted the bowls, L picked orange, A picked blue and purple. I ended up finishing off the purple one though, as A got a bit tired of using the tiny detail brush she’d decided to paint with. She chose a much thicker brush for the blue paint, which allowed her to paint the bowl more quickly and easily.

While the bowls dried we sorted out our tentacles. I thought the jelly-fish would look better with tentacles of varying lengths, so I wasn’t very particular about the length of the pieces as I cut them up. I placed the tentacles into two piles, one for each child, so that they each had a range of different tentacles to choose from. I ended up needing to cut more yarn up as we ran out before we had finished. Some of the yarn was feathers, and some was a powderpuff yarn that was fluffy. I thought these yarns looked really good on the jelly-fish, and it gave them a bit more variety and texture, than if we’d just used plain yarns.

Taping on tentacles.

Attaching tentacles.

To stick the tentacles onto the bowl, we used sticky tape. The kids made bundles of several tentacle pieces together in some sticky tape, and then they taped that to the inside edge of the bowl. I found that it was easiest to use a longer length of tape, stick the tops of the tentacles along it, and then fold it over to form a rectangle of tape housing a number of tentacles, and then tape that section into the bowl. We continued doing this all the way around the edge of the bowl to give the jelly-fish a good coverage of tentacles.