Cereal Box Aquarium

Here’s what you need:

• An empty cereal box
• Blue paint for the “water” and whatever colour you’d like for the outside of the “aquarium”
• Box cutter or scissors
• Glue gun
• Rocks or stones
• Shells
• Sand (we used kinetic sand cause that’s what we had on hand, but you could use regular sand)
• Green pipe cleaners
• Fishing line/thread/ribbon to suspend paper fish
• Construction paper for the fish (you could also use the side of the cereal box that you remove and paint them)
• Googly eyes (these are optional, you could draw the eyes on if you don’t have googly eyes)

Here’s what to do:

• Tape the open top of the cereal box
• Cut out one side of the box
• Paint the inside of the box blue (we did a couple of coats)
• Paint the outside of the box while the inside is drying
• When the paint is dry, glue on sand (kinetic and sticks to itself, so glue was sufficient but if you use regular sand, you might want to try sealing the outside with a bit of hairspray)
• Glue rocks along the bottom of the inside (this step as functional as well as decorative, as the rocks help the box stand up)
• Glue green pipe cleaners in clusters to represent seaweed
• Glue shells (careful not to burn yourself!)
• Cut out fish (if you use the leftover cardboard from the cereal box, you’ll want to paint them ahead of time so they have time to dry)
• Glue fishing line/thread/ribbon to the back of the fish and then glue other end to the top of the inside of the box

Voila! We spread this activity over two days; we painted two coats the first day and then assembled it the following day. We spent time talking about the different textures of all the materials, as well as different shell dwellers, and habitats of course. 🙂