Dear Reader,
first off, I have to give a disclaimer! We try to do activities that don’t take lots of prep time, but this is not one of those activities! And it would have been much longer if I didn’t beg for and receive a Cricut for Christmas (No perks received for name dropping).
I was looking over ideas for the week of activities I could do with my preschooler, and she was looking over my shoulders. When she saw a Cookie Monster beanbag toss she begged to make it. And asked about every hour on the hour. So, while she was at school, I worked hard to get it done and surprise her with it after school.
First, I pulled out my Cricut and paid the $1.99 for a cookie monster template (time was of the essence, so something premade was a must). It had a solid black mouth, but it was easy enough to cut it out. Especially because it cut out placement lines, so it did a lot of the cutting for me. I’m not all that familiar with my Cricut yet so that kinda surprised me. But it helped, so even thought it was a surprise, it was a good one.
Then I used the cricut to cut out circles in the felt. It didn’t go all the way through, even on the deeper setting, but it did make it easy enough for me to cut out the circles and get them to actually look like circles. And they’re all the same size, so once again, even though it wasn’t as expected, it was helpful. Once I got them all cut out, I blanket stitched around them (you could easily glue them, but I know how rough my kids are and that I’m pretty quick with a blanket stitch so I wanted them to last and maybe even survive the inevitable wash I foresee in their future). before you get them completely sewn, add some batting (beans might be better if you don’t intend to wash them. there isn’t much weight to the batting so they’re harder to throw.
Then I added the “chips” with a simple tack stitch. I know that a) it would have made more sense to sew these on first. So if you’re sewing them, do that first, and b) one little stitch isn’t gonna hold them on long, but it’s all I had thread and time for and I don’t really care when they come off. Obviously, hot gluing them on will work splendidly here, and if you are hot gluing, I really would add them after you get them together. You could also use permanent marker (I considered this but I had already pulled out the brown felt) or buttons (I might use buttons later. But don’t tell my button-collecting mother. She would say it is a waste of buttons. If you do buttons, sew them on really well. We do not want any choking kiddos).
Then I glued Cookie Monster’s face onto a cardboard box (if you want the game to last, laminating it is a good idea), used an X-Acto knife to cut out his mouth, and utility scissors to cut a window out of the top of the box for easy grabbing once the cookies are all in, and set it where my preschooler would see it when she got home.
She was pretty excited, and she made sure that everyone in the family had a turn throwing the cookies (seriously, you know how hard it is to avoid the “tossing cookies” idiom?) into Cookie Monster’s mouth. It is hard to make them all in, even for the adults, so once my daughter got bored she was just as happy to cheat (she giggled knowing it was cheating), and just feed Cookie Monster on her own for a while. My toddlers were all for that option, and they all played together happily for quite a while.
