Winter weather is always challenging with small children. Even with a mountain of recently new toys (aka Christmas) my girls still manage to complain about boredom.

This is a fun little craft you can complete quickly and easily, with items found around your home.

You will need:

toilet paper tubes – 1 per shaker
craft sticks – 1 per shaker
streamers, cut to length
rice, beans, pebbles, buttons or anything you can find that makes noise
glue sticks
stapler
scissors
colorful paper – optional, but fun!
Needle-nose Pliers – useful

Make it pretty

If you’re using craft paper, cut it to size, and glue it to your TP tube. OR you could color the tubes, decorate with stickers, use newspaper, magazine pages…Anything! Just use your imagination!

Make the shaker

Next, staple one side of the tube closed, and fill with your noise-making material. I used rice.

Bring it all together

The next part is a little tricky. You need to insert the craft stick and the streamers into the open end of the tube, close the tube around the stick and streamers, and staple everything shut.

My stapler was able to punch all the way through the craft stick, but it left sharp staple ends on the other side, so a pair of needle-nose pliers may be useful to get those pokey parts to lay flat.