By Shari Hiller and Matt Fox
mattandshari.com
Grab some sheets of your favorite colors of craft foam and whip up a Tic Tac Toe game for this weekend. It’ll keep the kids busy crafting in the afternoon and then the whole family can play in the evening.
Tip: This Tic Tac Toe project can be handled by a child that has mastered scissors and glue. My son helped out, but only in the gluing. He's still working on the scissors, and since we were making some special cuts, I thought the whole project would come out a bit more "geometric" if you will, if I did all the cutting.
Materials list:
An array of craft foam with two sheets large enough for your base size — ours was 10-inch square.
A piece of foam core board same size as base.
Foam glue
Scissors
Utility knife
Metal ruler
Cutting board to protect table tops
Triangle for square corners
Pencil
Circle to trace for making “O’s”
Instructions:
1. Start by cutting out a 10-inch square base of foam core. This helps keep the craft foam rigid. This cuts better with a metal ruler and a utility knife.
2. Cut your base craft foam with scissors to 10-inch square as well and glue it onto the foam core board.
3. Cut another piece of craft foam 10-inch square and this will be the divider for the 9, 3-inch squares.
4. Mark the grid on this piece starting from the right. Mark 3 inches then 1/2 inch for the grid line, then 3 inches then another 1/2 inch then the last 3 inches for the square. Mark the opposite side of the foam and draw four parallel lines.
5. Repeat step 4 on the last two sides of the grid foam. Cut out the 9 squares to create the grid.
This is the step that I was talking about earlier. Sure, your child can use scissors, but these are tight, narrow cuts and require a sharp pair of scissors, so be careful.
6. Glue the grid to the foam base. Now, here’s where your child should shine. Kids love glue and here’s the perfect opportunity to get it all over the table. I wished I had set down some brown or newspaper.
7. For placement of the grid we needed four hands. I know that white glue is supposed to dry clear, but if you can avoid getting a glob of glue anywhere but where the grid is to go, all the better. We did have to use a damp paper towel to wipe a few smudges off. (But, guess what? Even with a couple glue smudges, the Tic Tac Toe board still worked!)
8. Cut out playing pieces of your choice. We used all dots but made them three layers of craft foam thick to give them some sturdiness. This also allowed us to use color as the determination of which pieces belonged to each player instead of which shape.
9. Once we had 27 dots cut out, (I traced around a spice jar lid to get my circles all the same), we then glued three together with yellow on the bottom, blue in the center and green on the top.
10. The last step was the most fun: we played!
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