robot punchbox

My daughter had a robot birthday party last year and we had a lot of fun building robots, decorating robot helmets, and making games to share with her friends. I wanted to have something for the party that was like a pinata, but not actually a pinata. That probably sounds a little funny, but both my girls have winter birthdays and we end up with indoor parties. We don’t really have space in the house to be swinging bats or sticks. I also worry a little bit about how to keep it fair as all of the kids make a mad dash for the goodies – especially when there is a mix of big kids and little kids. I don’t know? Maybe I’m overthinking it? Anyway, the surprise part of a pinata is really fun, so we wanted something that had that aspect. We ended up making this robot punch box. I think he’s super cute and the kids had fun taking turns punching through the tissue paper to grab their (equally portioned) treats. 

I don’t have a full tutorial, but here is a quick description of how we made this guy:

We used 3 cardboard boxes, gray paint, rainbow tissue paper, red solo cups, glue/tape, and random odds and ends. His eyes are the caps from the plastic holders for a 6 pack of beer and the spiral on the top of his head came out of an old notebook that we needed to recycle.

  1. Paint the boxes and glue them together to make whatever shape you want. 
  2. Cut holes in the box for each punch spot. The holes should be big enough that little hands can fit in, but smaller than the opening of the cups. You need at least one per child.
  3. From the inside of the box, glue tissue paper over each hole. We did a rainbow pattern here, but any color or pattern would work. We just used regular Elmer’s glue for this.
  4. Fill the cups with the treats and glue one cup over each tissue paper covered hole from inside the box. The top/open side of the cup should be next to the box. We used a hot glue gun for this part.
  5. This was maybe excessive, but we also took scraps of cardboard to glue under each row of cups – sort of like a shelf support.
  6. Close the box up and finish decorating
  7. Enjoy!

It would be easy to modify this to fit lots of different birthday themes, so I imagine we’ll see punch boxes again at future birthday parties.