Easiest Ever Piñata!

Have you ever made paper mache with flour and water?

It is one of the messiest activities EVER!!

Yuck!

And it takes so long for it to dry that you can’t complete your craft very quickly.

We were babysitting the grandkids a little while ago and I decided on the spur-of-the-moment to make piñatas with the kiddos.

One sans the goop and mess.

One that was MUCH faster to make.

One that 4 year-olds wouldn’t lose interest in while making it.

And, one where I already had all of the materials. (That’s VERY important for these spontaneous crafts!)

Enter the easiest ever piñata craft!

Here’s what you’ll need:

• Lunch sack (mine were white)
• Tissue paper of various colors from the Dollar Store
• Scissors
• Tape
• Stapler
• Newspaper
• Wrapped taffy candy
• String
• Baseball bat

Before you start this activity with your grandkids, put a handful or two of taffy candy in the bottom of a lunch sack. Not too much. You don’t want the parents to be upset with how much sugar you feed the grandkids!

Crumple up a wee bit of newspaper and put it inside a lunch sack. (Have a lunch sack for each grandchild.)

(If  you plan this enough in advance, you could have little prizes, too. Since this was spur-of-the-moment, I just used the candy that I had on hand to put in the sack.)

Fold the top of the sack over and staple it shut so that the candy and newspaper won’t fall out.

Now, call over your little darlings!

Keep the tissue paper in its normal folded state. Cut several 2 inch wide strips from each color of paper.

Cut slits on one of the long edges to create a fringe. Unfold the strips.

Have your grandchild tape one strip of fringed paper around the bottom of sack.

(Since this was so spontaneous, I didn’t get pictures earlier in the process . . .  My bad!)

Take another strip of tissue paper and tape it slightly above the first strip so they are layered.

Keep taping strips on until you get to the top of your sack.

When the fringed tissue paper has covered the sack all the way to the top (or until your grandchild decides he is done), the piñata is finished. Ta da!

Of course the next step is to go outside and hit at the piñata until it breaks and all of the candy falls to the ground.

So, staple on a long piece of string. Go outside and throw the string over something that will put the piñata high enough to make it a challenge for your grandchild to hit. We put it over one of the beams in our pergola over our patio.

We gave our grandsons a fat plastic bat with the idea that if they accidentally hit themselves they wouldn’t get hurt too bad.

I was surprised how sturdy the sack was. It too quite a few whacks of the bat before the sack tore open.

Elliot loved the candy!

Here’s Simon taking a swing.

Success!

This took very little preparation. It was SUPER cheap because I had everything on hand. It was easy for the grandkids to do — and they REALLY loved taking swings at their piñata.

This would easily be scalable for a larger group of grandkids if the majority of them were at least six years old. I think that they wouldn’t need as much help as four-year-old Elliot did.

This would be a great activity for a family get together, a grandchild’s birthday party, or a family reunion!

Huzzah!