Spinning-Top Art

We combined art, crafts and science this week when we made these spinning art tops.

We needed:

cardstock

scissors

crayons or markers

glue

q-tips (or something narrow to use as a spinner)

We cut out circles from the cardstock, about 3 inches in diameter. Put a tiny hole in the very center of your circle. This is for older kids, so they can make their designs around the center. Color a design you want to try spinning.

Above are some rainbow spinners. We used a q-tip with the cotton removed and sharpened at one end to a point. (Use whatever you have--that's what I say) Put this into the center of your cardstock. We then added glue to the top and bottom of this center point. We didn't do this at first, and the holes in the tops quickly became to loose to spin. Dry this in a glass as shown above for about an hour.

Then comes the spinning fun!

Even Luke-3 was able to get these tops spinning. It is also interesting to see the colors mix as they spin.

This top was colored in quarters with red and blue.The spinning results are a lovely purple. You can't see it very well here, but the top becomes totally purple. We also tried yellow and blue to make green, but I think the blue was to dark and we didn't get a real good green.

Here is a very badly videotaped example of our spinning.