Mom's Microphones

My girls LOVE to perform -- if you've ever been to my house, you can vouch for this... They love to get up on the fireplace hearth and perform for an audience, they love to jump on my older daughter's bed and dance and sing, they love to get the step stool out of the bathroom and stand on it in the living room and sing. And their microphones? My older daughter grabs the Swiffer (mop) out of the closet and my little one grabs the (yuk!) fly swatter...

Recently though, my 8-year-old has been into using reusing materials -- boxes, bottles, toilet paper rolls, you name it -- and one night she showed me a microphone that she made out of stuffing a piece of paper towel into the end of an empty paper towel roll. She went off to school the next day, and I decided to surprise with my own version of a homemade microphone. I started by crumpling up a piece of paper towel and then wrapping that in a small piece of foil. I put that on one end of an empty paper towel roll, and and then I taped the bottom edges of the foil to the cardboard tube. Then, I covered the tube with a piece of black construction paper and taped that to hold it in place (this also covered and secured the bottom part of the foil). Voila! Very simple, very cute toy microphone -- and I made it all out of things that I had around the house.

I made 2 matching microphones -- one for each girl, of course -- and I surprised them with their microphones when my daughter got home from school that day, They just love them, and I haven't seen the fly swatter out of the closet since then -- yay!