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Saturday, May 11, 2013

DIY-Play Laptop for Children-(Dip Into Your Imagination and Pretend) :)

Ok,

I haven't posted in a while and so I am posting several different things tonight. This post is something that I wanted to share with everyone that has children and they like to pretend.

 My 6 year old loves to pretend and he loves to draw. The boys love paper crafts. They especially love it when I print certain characters or whatever I can find and make it into 3D characters. He now has this thing where he makes us our own cardboard crafts and we have to cut them out and glue them together. He also draws various things on paper and had made his own play laptop out of paper and tapes his blank piece of paper on the play laptop screen and draws his art at the moment and then brings it to us and says he made this on the computer and printed it out for us. It is just the cutest thing in the world.

So it got my crazy brain thinking.... (dangerous....I know!) about making him a semi-realistic laptop from printing it off the computer. I found various pictures off of the internet of a laptop keyboard and then a laptop screen and altered them to my liking and then glue them onto foam board and cardboard and colored around the edges black. I then used construction paper for the top. I even made it to where he can open and close it like a real laptop. It was a bit tricky but I finally got it to work and it actually stays open for him to type or whatever and then he closes it when he is done. After everything was dry, I sprayed it with clear lacquer and let it dry. Then I took a wooden sculpting tool that I had and scored the lines in-between the keys on the keyboard to make it look and feel realistic and it turned out pretty good. I could have made it look even better if I would have taken more time but I wasn't sure if he would really care about it. Well, he was extremely excited and think he is cool with his laptop. :)

Imagination is a beautiful thing!!!! I don't think I ever lost mine. To this day, I want to believe there is more out there than just us (fairies). :)

Well, if you would like to know all of the specifics of how I made the laptop and what supplies I used, just contact me or comment me and I will be happy to go over it with you.

Here are some pictures of the finished laptop.


So here in these pictures if you look close, you can see the keyboard and where I scored the in between the keys and it looks soooooo real and even feels real. Doing that part to the keyboard really made it feel real to him and me. He liked it before but it made it better. It is a must step if you decide to make one for someone. :)

In this picture, you can see the screen and it looks realistic (pay no attention to the colored boxes on the screen, we used scrap paper for this and loaded it wrong in the printer) however, my son wanted it to stay on there because he said it looked real. :)


I hope that you decide to make one. You will be glad you did because any child with a great imagination that loves to 'pretend' will have a ball with it!

Cassie :)

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