Do-It-Yourself Robot Snacks for Kids

Do your kids ask you for snacks 200 times per day? Mine do. They ask me for a snack while I’m fixing their breakfast, before they go to bed, and when they are in the bath tub. Sometimes they ask me for a snack while they’re clearing the dishes off the table from the snack they just ate. I don’t want them to be hungry, of course, but I suspect that these requests are prompted by boredom almost as often as they are prompted by hunger pangs so I decided to make make snack time more entertaining by combining a craft and food with these do-it-yourself robot snacks.

I began by setting out a variety of different foods to create with. The first step was to make a couple peanut butter sandwiches and cut them into rectangular shapes that could be used for the heads and bodies of the robots. Then I pulled little bits of this and that out of the fridge. My main goal was to provide the kids with a variety of shapes — sticks for arms and legs, circles for wheels, and smaller items for details — but I also used this as an opportunity to finish off the last of the blueberries and use up the remaining celery sticks before they went rubbery.

I ended up with blueberries, ranch dip, sliced olives, celery, carrots and radish slices. Some ideas for ingredients:

• Sticks — carrots, celery, sugar snap peas, bell pepper strips, green beans, string cheese or pretzels
• Circles — sliced radishes or cucumbers, bananas, carrot coins, cherries, berries, cherry tomatoes or grapes
• Details — olives, blueberries, edamame, peas or corn

Then I set the kids to work. I started my boys off by giving them each a couple sandwich pieces to use as the base but it didn’t take long at all for them to get into the nitty gritty of creating their robots. Honestly, I thought they would slap arms and legs on the plate and start eating in under two minutes, but they spent quite a bit of time adding joints, control panels and other details.

They were both quite proud of their creations when they were finished and they even asked me to take photos and text them to their dad before they ate them.

When it was time to eat, the boys chowed down on their sandwiches and most of the fruits and veggies on their plates and they ate all the leftover ingredients I’d set out for them too. There may have been a few pieces of celery and quite a few olives leftover, but that’s cool because they didn’t ask me for another snack for at least another 30 minutes.