Kid Craft: Make Toilet Paper Tube Toy Binoculars

This craft project is so easy that an eight-year-old kid could do it.

Heck, this craft project is so easy that an eight-year-old-kid INVENTED it!

Needing the perfect pair of toy binoculars (real binoculars simply wouldn’t do, on account of you actually need to be looking long distances when you look through them, not *pretending* to look long distances. Make sense? No? Not really to me, either, but we’re not eight), my kid simply constructed them for herself. It’s an easy rainy day/snowy day craft, and it’s apparently quite satisfying to the eight-year-old age group, because this pair of toilet paper tube toy binoculars has been part of the kid’s pretend play for weeks now.

Here’s how your eight-year-old (or six-year-old, or ten-year-old, or…) can make her very own pair.

You will need:

• three toilet paper tubes. You don’t need any instructions about where to source these, right?
• pair of scissors
• stapler
• markers, paint, or stickers for embellishment

1. Have the kid cut one toilet paper tube all the way up the middle. 

2. Decorate. If the kid wants, she can use markers, paint, stickers, or whatever else she can think of to decorate her binoculars. Mine drew a tree, because these are her “nature binoculars.” Camouflage would be excellent for a military buff, or a superhero logo for an undercover Captain America.

3. Staple another toilet paper tube to each side of the cut-open tube. A standard stapler is all your kid will need to assemble her binoculars, although if you’re out of staples, hot glue or double-sided tape would work in a pinch.

Although this project is super simple and absolutely free, it would actually be a great craft for a children’s party–my kids have been to “nature” parties, “explorer” parties, Wild Kratts parties, and one actually kind of disturbing “soldier” party, and a “make your own binoculars” craft would have fared well at any of them.

It would certainly be less violent than the PVC pipe swords and cardboard shields that my kids have made at and for their own birthday parties, just in case you think I’m getting a little too precious about soldier parties. Yeah, I let my kids make pipe swords and give them to other children as their birthday gifts. I have no room to talk.