Create tin can creatures

Before you begin 

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Additional help to carry out your risk assessment, including examples.
• Make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help if you’re short on helpers.

Planning this activity

• In the weeks before this session, ask everyone to collect clean items of household recycling, especially food packaging, such as plastic bottles, tins, lids and yoghurt pots.

Understand upcycling

1. Gather everyone together and ask if anyone knows what upcycling is. Upcycling means repairing or repurposing an item, so it’s a great way to recycle old, damaged or broken items. You can also upcycle items by finding a new way to use them. This means it can still be used and doesn’t go to landfill.  
2. Ask if anyone can think of any examples of anything that’s been upcycled. For example, someone might add new fabric to a chair, so that it looks newer or is more comfortable. 
3. See if anyone can name any of the benefits of upcycling for nature and the environment. Upcycling means less waste in landfill. It’s also more energy efficient than recycling, and it helps people take ownership of the things they consider ‘rubbish’ – thinking about whether they need to throw away and replace something or whether they could improve what they already have.
4. Tell everyone that you’re going to turn food packaging into garden ornaments.

Design time

1. Before you begin, make sure to lay down something to protect the surfaces.
2. First, it’s time to plan the design, so hand out paper, pencils and drawing materials. Ask everyone to think about any wildlife or insects they’ve seen outdoors recently, then think about how they can use the recycled items you have, including the size, textures, colours and shapes, to create this. 
3. For inspiration, you may want to chat through some ideas. People could create animals or plants (for example using a plastic bottle as the body of an animal) or try to capture individual elements of beauty they see in nature, such as sunbeams through branches, ripples on a pond, or a flower’s brightly coloured petals.
4. Next, when everyone’s got their design ready, everyone can carefully choose the craft items or recycling they need. Remember to check any recycled items are clean and dry!
5. Everyone should use paint to give all their items a strong base colour that suits their design.
6. While everything is drying, people can start making or adding features.
7. For an animal, you could cut out pieces of plastic to make fins, wings, ears or tails. 
8. When the base layer is dry, people can paint their features and again wait for everything to dry.
9. Finally, with adult supervision or with an adult leading the task, assemble all the items and features using a glue gun.
10. If anyone wants to, they could add finishing touches. You could draw stripes or dots on the body of an animal using marker pens, or add antennae by gluing on pipe cleaners or pom-poms.
11. An adult should supervise or should help carefully attach one end of a garden stick to their creation using a glue gun.
12. Remember to tidy up, making sure any unused items are recycled. Be careful of sharp edges.
13. Now, it’s time to put out your ornaments or take them home. Try getting in touch with a local community area and see if they’ve any outdoor space in need of some brightening up. You could also sell your crafts to raise money for a cause you’re passionate about.