Playing Tall with Homemade Tin Can Stilts

The kids and I are all quite short.  I'm not exaggerating; it's a workout every evening to make dinner because I have to use my step ladder just to reach our canned food.  My poor kids got some real vertically challenged genes in their DNA, and I carry part of that blame.  Sorry kiddos!

One of the outdoor toys that were always a big hit with my prekindergarten students were the bucket type stilts.  The children always had a lot of fun pretending to be taller while they practiced their coordination while walking around the playground. I was thinking about all this a few weeks ago, looking around on Pinterest when I saw the perfect easily homemade version of stilts, which can be put together in just a few minutes with just four things:  rope, a drill, duct tape, and a couple gallon sized cans.

Now, I personally have never found any need to buy any gallon cans of food.  My grandma, on the other hand, is one very wonderful lady who volunteers a ton of her time making food for church programs and soup kitchens.  She cooks a lot of food, and, lucky for me, goes through a lot of gallon sized cans.  A quick phone call, and grandma was happy to wash and set aside some cans for my project.

Grandma goes thru a lot of cans.

 After thanking Grandma for the cans and the short person DNA, I got out our drill and drilled two holes on opposite sides about a half an inch below the sealed end of the cans.

I don't know what size drill bit I used, but the holes aren't very large at all.

Then I tore off some strips of duct tape about a half inch wide and covered the edges of the holes so there would be no sharp edges that could cut into the rope.  Then I taped the ends of the rope (I used about four and a half feet of rope per stilt) and ran them through the holes, tying the ends together at the top.

Here you can kind of see the duct tape around the drilled holes.

After tying off the ends of the ropes into a big loop on each stilt, the kids were ready to play tall!

Dirty D took a little time getting adjusted to the height

While Princess experimented with walking backwards on the stilts.

From start to finish, these took only about 20 minutes to make...the longest time I spent on them was actually lining the drilled holes with duct tape.  If you're like me and can't see buying gallon sized cans, and don't have a grandma who loves to cook for everybody, you could ask your local soup kitchen, church, or even hometown restaurant if they could set aside a few large cans for you.  Many would be more than happy too!

FYI, I used the stilts too! They add several inches to your height when you use them, and that's definitely something I had fun with.  It certainly was fun to be taller for a bit, I see why the kids and their friends have been using them so often!