Science Project: Recycled Valentine's Day Box

I apologize for the lack of blogging lately. I didn't realize until now that it's been almost a month since I posted. I was going to email this picture to a few of you, but decided to blog about it here instead.

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The 2nd graders Valentine's Day box is a science project this year. The students had to make their box out of recyclable items that they had at home. Parent's were not allowed to buy new items for this. And if the box has at least 7 recycable items, then the project receives an "A". Emily said she wanted to do a cat (and all her cat's have to be black because that's just the way she is, so Matt spray painted everything black). The body is a shoe box and the 4 legs are mini aluminum pop cans. The head is a cardboard box. The ears are plastic chocolate milk bottles from McDonalds. The tail is 2 closepins. The eyes are buttons and felt. The nose is a pom-pom and the mouth and whiskers are pipe cleaners. And no, we did not cheat, as we already had all these items.

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I, of course, burned my fingers while hot gluing on the pipe cleaners. This is something I do often (refer to my October post about our Halloween pumpkins), so no one was surprised when it happened. But a few moments after that, my hot glue gun burnt itself. I had just started a new glue stick and I was really leaning in close to it as I was pushing hard on the new stick, when right in front of my face the glue gun sort of exploded. There was a loud pop and I saw a ball of fire inside the gun. Lucky for us, I was on the last two whiskers, so I had enough heat to finish. Later I tried to turn on the light above the sink, but it didn't work and neither did the garbage disposal. It turns out that the "explosion" burnt up the electrical outlet box in the kitchen and Matt had to replace it. So the point of the Valentine's Day box project was to make something out of nothing for zero cost, but in our case it cost us a new hot glue gun and a new electrical outlet! I'll have to send Mrs. Scott a bill. :)