Awesome Dawson and a Cardboard Robot Craft

This post contains affiliate links. You can read my disclosure policy here.

We just checked out this great book called Awesome Dawson from the library last week. One of my boys spotted it on a shelf – I think it was the cool looking goggles that Dawson was wearing that caught his eye – and asked if we could check it out. We read it that night before bed, and the boys loved it.

Dawson is a clever inventor, with a quirky robot sidekick, who finds a way to re-use anything. When one of his inventions goes awry, he’s able to save the day with some quick thinking and handy re-purposing. The illustrations were incredible and detailed. We could easily spend a good 10 minutes on each page just talking about all the neat things we could see. And of course, anything with robots in it was a win in our boys’ eyes.

I decided to put together a fun project this last week to go along with the book. We talked about how vacuums worked, using their The New Way Things Work book. And then put it into practice by vacuuming (win-win right there!). We talked a lot about re-using things, which was very fitting since that’s what we tend to do for many of our craft projects. I had the boys keep an eye out for things they could gather to re-use so we could build robots.
This is the pile we came up with:

Assembly time! They both wanted arms that would swivel. I started by sticking a thin cardboard tube through the body of the robot.

Then we attached a toilet paper roll.

I capped off the cardboard tube with a little duct tape so the arm wouldn’t slip off. Nothing fancy, but they thought it was fun that the arms could move.


Awesome Dawson is definitely going on someone’s birthday list, and I can’t wait to see if we can find more of Chris Gall’s books at the library.

If you’re looking for more easy craft projects to do with your kids, make sure you check out KiwiCo! Our kids love the boxes they get every month, and I’m always impressed at the quality of crafts and projects they come with (and how easy it is for some of them to do on their own!).