Easy Cardboard Rocket Craft

This year's Vacation Bible School curriculum was called To The Edge, and it was space themed. My sister-in-law Rachael was in charge of the decorations, and people, it was out of this world! (Bahahahaha! Snort. Okay, just ignore me) Seriously though, she did an amazing job. Check out a few of the pictures (Excuse the quality of some of them. The lighting wasn't the best in some areas. I plan to post some of the pictures from the actual event on a later post.):

The black light hallway was a huge hit.

My mom and dad put these rockets together, and Rachael made that awesome astronaut herself!

The "computer screens" at the control panels even lit up!

This robot. How amazing is this? Of course I think the guy standing next to him is pretty amazing too. :)

I can't believe how detailed everything was. Have I mentioned that she's five months pregnant and has two kids under four? Yeah, serious supermom stuff.

Anyway, I was really surprised at the lack of VBS friendly space themed crafts out there on Pinterest. There were a lot of space themed projects, but very little that could be done with multiple kids in 20 minutes. So I wanted to share these awesome rockets we made!

This is a super quick and simple craft, even for a group, especially if you have your paper pre-cut. Materials needed are as follows:

5 inch cardstock circle

Toilet paper roll or other cardboard tube about 4 inches in height

Scrapbook paper or plain white copy paper 4x8 inches

3-4 wood half circles

Hot glue gun

At VBS we used plain white paper to wrap the rockets and let the kids color on them. You can absolutely use toilet paper rolls, but a friend at church brought me a massive bag of these heavy duty cardboard shipping tubes from his job. They were already 4 inches long, and they were perfect for this craft!

First run a line of hot glue down the side of your cardboard tube.

Glue down your paper on the short edge, wrap all the way around the rocket and glue down the other end.

Cut a slit halfway across your 5 inch circle and form into a cone shape.

Glue the cone closed.

 Run a thick line of hot glue around the rim of your tube and set the cone on top. Make sure to put it on straight, and make sure it touches the glue all the way around.

Glue on your wooden half circles as feet. (Or a stand maybe? thrusters? I don't know.) I found these in bags of 100 pieces at Hobby Lobby. However, they were in the clearance section for about $4, so I don't know if they stock them anymore,  but if you are making a bunch of these and can't find the half circles, you could buy wood circles to cut in half. If you are just making one or two, you could use any number of things in their place - paper straws, popsicle sticks, short lengths of dowel rod, etc.

The kids had a blast (hehe) with these, and they were appealing to a wide age group. At VBS I had the kids glue on the paper around the side and glue the cones closed with glue sticks for safety reasons. I and another worker glued the cones to the top and glued the feet on with hot glue. I made some extras for our nursery age kids who didn't get to participate in craft time, and they were a universal hit (ha! I can't stop!).