Homeschooling Activities:

Build Your Own Dinosaur Robots

Finding out how to build a robot dinosaur is one of our most enjoyable homeschooling activities.

You'll be building robot body parts using bits of homeschool household junk – plastic bottles, jam jar lids, barbecue sticks, air fresheners – to create your own robot dinosaur which really moves and looks fantastic.

I can show you the basics, but you need to get hold of this inspirational book to do it properly:

Making Dinosaur Robots From Junk by Stephen Munzer

It doesn't get much more cool than this!

Now DIY is not one of my strong points and I had to be nagged into it but the techniques are basically simple.

How To Build Robots

You'll be heating a bradawl (a screwdriver will do) over a candle flame to make axle holes in a plastic spray bottle. Barbecue sticks are great as homeschool axles and circular air fresheners make cool wheels.

It's amazing how much pleasure William and Catherine got from just learning how to make something move.

It's also marvellous for teaching cool homeschooling design and technology.

For all sorts of free ideas and examples of other fun crafts for kids, Catherine will show you how to make cool robots, including Ray Droid and Squash Bot, in our homeschooling page on how to build a robot. You'll see how to build your own robot body parts for beginners and find out how to make robot wheels out of milk bottle tops.

Building Dinosaur Robots

The techniques you'll be using for the activities really open your mind to the possibilities of using household junk to learn how to build all sorts of creative homeschooling activities. Catherine (age 10) is now at the stage of being able to build her own homeschool robots - wait until you meet Saw Bot!

How to Build Your Own Own Robot Dinosaur

For the full details, you need to get Stephen Munzer's book, which tells you how to make a robot and also has suggestions for cool activities like dinosaur battles and homeschool remote control units. You'll find it going very cheap on Amazon but the reason it's cheap is that it's getting a bit out-of-date. The drive to have 'new look' cool products to tempt us means that a lot of your household 'junk' will have changed design since then.

That's not a problem in that the techniques you use when you build robots are easily adaptable, but it does mean your homeschooling activities are going to have to be a bit more creative! To help you, Catherine's taken you through the steps stage by stage so you can see the crafts skills you'll need to build your own robot in her page on homeschooling recycled crafts.

Homeschooling Activities: T-WRECKS PARTS LIST

1. 1 trigger-action spray bottle
2. 2 circular air fresheners
3. 1 wedge-shaped air freshener
4. 8 plastic forks
5. 1 plastic coat hanger
6. 2 metal bolts or screws
7. 1 plastic drinking straw
8. 3 wooden barbecue skewers
9. 2 plastic wall plugs
10. Gold spray paint

As you can see, I had two keen homeschooling helpers to gather everything together for these activities!

The book is aged 8+, we learnt how to build our homeschool T-Wrecks dinosaur robot at 5 and William is still enjoying learning more about building robots at age 12.

For the first dinosaur robot the children were largely helpful spectators when it came to actually learning how to use heated bradawls and hacksaws – but it's surprising how much they learn from watching our homeschooling activities. If you get stuck in too it's also much more fun for you!

Building Robot Dinosaurs

Homeschooling Activities: T-WRECKS TECHNIQUES

I'm not going to attempt to give a full account of how to build a homeschool robot T-Wrecks. You need the book and you need to follow the safety instructions. I was never happy about leaving the children unsupervised – a heated bradawl in the eye comes agonisingly to mind.

More helpful is to give a quick round up of the basic methods, which you can apply to build a dinosaur robot or when you're deciding how to build other cool homeschooling design activities.

1. Cool homeschool robot BODY components are plastic spray bottles, loo cleaner bottles with swan-shaped necks and motor oil bottles.
2. You make robots MOVE by piercing axle holes through the bottom using a bradawl heated over a nightlight. Use barbecue sticks through the holes as axles. Homeschool wheels look cool if you build them from CDs. Or you can use milk bottle tops glued together, air freshener halves, insulation pipe and jam jar lids (tricky). Bits of plastic straw make good homeschool spacers between the body and the wheels.
3. TEETH and CLAWS look cool made out of plastic forks. T-Wrecks gets his fearsome mouth from fork ends heated in a candle flame.
4. Homeschool WINGS look good from a plastic carrier bag.
5. Homeschool dinosaur robot TAILS are excellent as sawn-off coat hangers.

If all this talk about building wings and tails for robots isn't making much sense, have a look at our homeschool Terror-Saw:

Cool Robots

Once your creative imagination is fired, you'll see all sorts of homeschool possibilities lying around! Here are some more homeschooling suggestions for cool robots:

• Antennae – wall plugs
• Necks – garden hose
• Stegosaurus plates – plastic spoons
• You can learn how to make a saw bade tail by warming CDs in water and snipping teeth in them
• Homeschool body coloration for robots is best delivered via gold or silver spray paint. It may sound a little garish but it really adds the finishing cool touch to your homeschool dinosaur robots

Robot Building For Beginners

In the process of learning how to build a robot it's astonishing how much your children will find out about homeschooling design and technology. It's also a cool way to recycle.

If your children would like how to make a different sort of homeschool model, we've got advice on the best model airplane kits to choose in our holiday activities for children.

There's lots more to discover in the world of how to build a robot. And dinosaurs have to be one of those cool homeschooling activities where you can really let the imagination fly.

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