Make it snappy

Last Saturday morning over breakfast, a rather raucous family game evolved; we took turns being wild animals while everyone else guessed what we were. Daisy's angry monkey, Buddy's vicious shark and daddy's sleepy sloth made us laugh so much that cereal nearly came out of our noses. When my turn came, I stretched my arms out like snappy jaws and everyone guessed straight away; a crocodile, of course - too easy.

Crocodiles featured again this week; Bud and Daisy watched Disney's Peter Pan - they love the crocodile-chasing-Hook-at-ludicrous-speed-across-the-sea sequence, and we've been enjoying our favourite crocodile books; Melrose and Croc and The Star-faced Crocodile, pictured below.

The crocodiles in both stories are so soft nurture it's easy to forget the nature of the real deal - until you meet SNAPPY-CROC (top picture) made by Buddy and Daisy with a little help from mummy.

Here's how we made him:

To make his eyes, nostrils and teeth, we glued pieces from two egg boxes onto thick, folded cardboard (ours was packaging from a new bed sheet).

Each tooth-triangle was folded about 5mm from its base and stuck to the perimeter of the card with a glue-stick. Later, I added a strip of masking tape to his whole dental region, just to secure the odd wobbly tooth.

We trimmed his back teeth to make them extra 'sharp' and to enable that long jaw to close.

Once dry, we painted him to the children's specification; red inside, green outside and he had to have yellow eyes. I mixed in a fair bit of PVA glue in the hope of preventing the paint peeling off (too reptilian).

Et voila!

SNAPPY-CROC has been a huge success. He's certainly seen a lot of action; he lost a tooth in a particularly violent tussle with Nan, and he's been the reason for much of the recent laughter, shrieking and running around in our house. Not bad going for a bit of old cardboard rescued from the recycling box.