Meeting Twelve Prep

I'm not sure if this is going to be a hit yet, but we'll see. For meeting twelve, we'll be making classic popsicle stick birdhouses. Thankfully, one of our awesome parents donated a giant box of popsicle sticks, so if the girls have trouble, we'll have extras, and lots of them.

The last time I made one of these, I was in elementary school, so I had to do some research on this, and find a way to do this without having to buy more sticks (granted, we have 1,000 sticks, so we should be ok). Some versions have you using dozens of sticks to make large houses. We also won't have to time to make those, so we needed to find something smaller, more practical, and easy enough for our Daisies to do. I can honestly say that for the first time ever, a search on Pintrest did not help, so on to Google I went! And oh the horrors I found! I mean, a house that needs 800 sticks, one that needs sticks, pine cones and hot glue, another one that needed a milk carton to glue the sticks onto and I even found one project that used tongue depressors to make a castle. I mean, really? Who has time to do that? Around page 12, I found a poem about birdhouses. It was about that time that I wanted to bang my head against the wall and wished that I could remember how we did in art class all those years ago. By the time I hit page 22, I was running into to sites that were selling kits to make birdhouses. I even found a book on making "creative" birdhouses. But, thanks to a clever little article on Ehow, it hit me- log cabin style.

The principle is fairly simple. Make a base by lining up several popsicle sticks (enough to cover the length of one) and then use a popsicle stick on either end to hold/glue the ends together. From there, stack it like you would a log cabin, gluing at the corners. To make this easier, we got out some foam sheets we had left over from another project and cut them into square so the girls could use them for the bases. We also used the excess foam to make roofs for the houses. I made one to show them how, but figure like mot projects, it's best to just show them, and then let them do the rest.