bottlecap snakes!

When life hands you 12,987,645 soda bottle caps....make bottlecap snakes! We recently made these adorable snake sculptures in my Kindergarten class and the kids absolutely ADORED them! This project takes quite a bit of prep work, but your children will enjoy the outcome so much that it won't matter how long it took!

Materials:
20 soda bottle caps (or water bottle caps) with pre-drilled holes in the center
Floral wire
Pony Beads
Button Assortment
Colored Sharpies (optional)
Googly-eyes (optional)

Begin by having students use pony beads to make the snake's "tongue". We use about 8 beads for this and while some like to use red, others like to use multiple colors or patterns! The first bottlecap that you string on should have the flat (top) of the cap facing the beads.

String the remaining bottle caps in a pattern (or not, either works just fine!) and when you get to the last bottlecap you need to flip it backwards.

You can see the last two bottlecaps on this wire, the white one is facing one direction and the blue cap (the last one) has been flipped backwards. Then have students select 8 buttons that vary in size and line them up large to small. They are going to string the buttons on large to small (this is the "rattle").

Last, they glued google eyes on the front of their snake and decorated the white bottlecaps with patterns using Sharpies. This was the MOST fun with a project I've ever seen them have...they named them and played with them while they waited for their friends to finish!

So this summer while you're staying hydrated with water, save those bottlecaps, because you never know how you can use them!

Joanna Davis-Lanum is a National Board Certified Art teacher that also blogs on her classroom blog "We Heart Art". She loves to use recycled products to make art projects because it teaches her students how to be creative and resourceful! Happy summer!