Yesterday we had great fun creating our own monsters!

What you will need

1. A pencil
2. Paper
3. A long ruler
4. Some crayons and colouring pencils
5. A scissors
6. Glue
7. Some coloured paper
8. A dice
9. A piece of card to assemble all your finished monsters

Steps

1. Create your monster template.

• Orientate your page as portrait. Using your long ruler create a table on a sheet of A4 paper.
• You will need seven columns. A chance for some arithmetic here! How wide is your page? How many centimetres should each column be so they are evenly spaced?
• Leave the first column without a header. Label the next six columns one to six, each corresponding to a face of the dice.
• Next create your rows. We used ten rows; one was our header row and the other nine represented the monsters’ various body parts.

2. Roll your first monster!

• In our case we had nine rolls per monster. Using our template above, if our first roll was a two our monster would have a triangle head. If our next roll was a four he would have big ears and angry eyebrows, and so on for seven more dice rolls.
• Some more advanced arithmetic, how many different types of monsters can our template create?
• And even more advanced…… how many rolls before we are likely to have a repeat of a previous monster? I left that one to Dad, see his calculations below:

This surprised Mum! There are 10,077, 696 (or 6⁹) possible monsters but after only about 3,750 monsters there is roughly a 50% chance that you will have drawn at least one repeat monster!

3. Everyone makes their own monsters! Even unimaginative types like Mum could come up with some pretty unusual and unique monsters!

4. Create the background for your eclectic monster family! We used a cornflakes box and blue, green and yellow paper for our background.

5. Cut out all your monsters and glue them onto the background. As you can see in the picture Mum was a bit lazy cutting out two of the monsters. Rachel was our star cutter outer!

Have fun!