Quick Lil' Campfire

Is your little corner of the world on a fire ban like us?  Do you have a camp-in date night planned, or just want a safe faux campfire for your littles to play with?  Are you a teacher and want a "campfire" for your morning meetings or writers to share their stories around?  Here is a QUICK lil' campfire you can whip up in half an hour or less, and best of all it's almost FREE!

YOU WILL NEED:

Wrapping paper, paper towel tubes (or toilet paper tubes): 5 or 6 lengths that are half the width of the fire you want to make and several (6 or 7) smaller-cut circles.

Paper (a few shades of yellow and a light orange work best) that is crumpled and gathered at the center of each piece, hot glue gun/gluesticks, scissors (optional)

STEP ONE: Glue the sides of your long tubes together at one end and fan out so that they look like spokes--it's more sturdy if you also glue a smaller circle in the middle of it.

STEP TWO: Glue the small circles in between each long tube at the center.  This not only gives it a little more sturdiness but also will come in handy for step 3.  :)

STEP THREE: Put a little hot glue in the inside of one of the small circle tubes and push the crumpled, gathered corner of a yellow paper inside of it.  Continue around, alternating shades of yellow.  In the center hole, stick at least three crumpled pieces of paper in it to make it a nice, full flame.

STEP FOUR: Cut out 3-4 orange flame shapes (you'll want them to be a little bigger than the rest of the fire, for a pleasing visual dimension) and stick them in between the yellow paper flames.  Depending on your purpose, you can glue them in or not.  (In this sharing time activity, I had stories/honesty case studies written on each orange flame that they could pick out to read, so they were removable.  If I were making this for a child's plaything, I'd glue them in for sure.  In my classroom, I might have review questions, songs, morning meeting prompts, writer/reader response questions, etc. on the flames and have them removeable.)

STEP FIVE: Gather around your lil' campfire and tell stories, sing songs, and share good conversation!

Sharing pioneer stories around the campfire with our senior primary :)
Got the idea and the stories/case studies HERE.

I love this lil' campfire TONS and I can't wait to use it in my someday-classroom as well!  :)  Happy camping!