Tag: den

Tipi Tent

Would you like to learn how to make a very easy house for your rabbit or a fairy out of sticks?

You will need:

  • 3 or more straight sticks  of the same length
  • A pipe cleaner or two
  • Extra things to decorate your house

First let’s practice wrapping.

Hold out your two fingers and wrap the pipe cleaner around them several times.


When that is easy you’re ready to begin.

  • Gather your materials
  • Step 1: Make an X
  • Step 2: Wrap the pipe cleaner around the top like this
  • Step 3: Add the third stick and wrap it with the remaining pipe cleaner
  • Tada! If you wrapped it tight enough you’ve just made a tipi tent
  • See your rabbit can go inside.
  • Then decorate with sticks, ribbons, yarn, leaves, whatever you want!

Note:
Your tripod will only be secure when the sticks are driven into soft ground (dirt or playdough)

Experiment lots until you get it secure and stable so it  doesn’t knock over when you put your toys inside of it.

Add more sticks to the sides. Decorate!

To the grownups

This is a skill that is repeatable on a larger scale to build a full size fort (with long enough sticks) or den. We will continue to build upon these skills to build several different forts.

A Frame Stick House

Let’s continue our practice building houses for fairies and gnomes and see if we can’t build something a little bit bigger so they can have some friends over.

You will need:

  • 4 sticks the same length
  • 1 stick a bit longer than the others
  • 5-8 pipe cleaners
  • soft ground
  • a small blanket or piece of cloth
  • clothes pegs

Last week we learned how to make a tipi style shelter.

This week we are going to start with a similar shelter but instead of 3 sticks the same length we will add one that is a bit longer. When you stand it up you can see the longer stick makes more room for storage at the back of our house. But we are going to continue and make even more room.

Watch my 6 year old build an A frame shelter. Apologies for the terrible video. New skill!

The full scale inspiration for this Woodland Forest Shelter

  • Step 1: Make an X
  • Step 2: Wrap the pipe cleaner around the top like this
  • Step 3: Add the longest stick on top of your X
  • Step 4: Wrap to secure
  • Step 5: Make a second X
  • Step 5: Attach the other end of your long stick to the X just like the first.
  • Tada! You’ve made an A Frame. It’ll be a bit wobbly so I’m going to secure it into the ground.
  • Step 6: Secure in ground by pushing in the sticks.There we go. All pushed in and I added my tea towel mini-tarp
  • Step 7: Secured to the edges with clothes pegs.
  • All done. Clara thinks it looks good!

After you have made your modified tipi. Take your two remaining sticks and make another X in the same manner you started the tipi.

Take the end of your long stick and place it between the top of your second X and viola! A frame stick shelter.

It is going to fall down very easily until you secure the poles. You can do that by pressing the ends of the Xs into the ground or tying the ends of your ridge pole to a tree.

Now that you have a frame your next task is to build walls. You can use more sticks and bark and lean them up against the edges or you can use your bit of fabric or blanket and peg it with a clothes peg.

After you have built the walls you might want to decorate. You can use leaves, grass, flowers, pinecones. Whatever you want to lean up against the walls of your mini shelter. When you’ve done decorating it’s time to play!

Find some toy animals and see what they think of your creation.

Maybe you can build a whole town of shelters for your toys.