Recently, my daughter was required to make a creature using a vegetable, fruit, or a potato for one of the clubs that she is a part of. She decided to make her own potato hedgehog using a potato, toothpicks, craft sticks, and pipe cleaners. When she did this project, it reminded me of my book Jobs of a Preschooler when the little girl was a “doctor putting patients back together”.

Here is a picture of her little creature that she named Timothy Hedge the Toothpicked Hedgehog:

This was a simple, inexpensive project that anyone can do at home. Maybe the little ones in your life would enjoy making their own little creatures. They could even make cucumber creatures to go along with the book Pickles, Pickles, I Like Pickles. If you don’t have any cucumbers around, they can make their own cucumber characters with green construction paper like we did at a library storytime I did last month. (If you missed that post, you can read about it here.)

Here are some of the paper cucumber creations from the storytime:

What creature will your little one create?

One of the disadvantages of creating a creature from food is that they don’t last for a long time; however, we decided to use the hedgehog for a little experiment by cutting it in half. We laid one half cut-side down on a plastic plate, and we left the other half cut-side up to see which one would rot faster. We had assumed that the half with the cut-side exposed would rot faster. After two days, this was the result:

We were correct. The side that was exposed to the air rotted much faster as you can see in the picture. The piece on the left was the one facing down on the plate, and the piece on the right was the one exposed to the air.

What kinds of experiments can you and your “little scientists” come up with?