Shrinky Dinks

I remember being in elementary school and doing shrinky dinks in the kitchen with my mom and sister. They were so fun and cool! I try really hard to do a mixture of high and low tech programs with my students. It is a fine line to show them the wonders of technology, but ALSO that you don’t *have* to have it to have fun.

For anyone who doesn’t know, here is the basic breakdown of shrinky dinks. You draw/color your design on the shrinky paper, put it in the oven/toaster oven according to the package instructions, and watch them shrink! Unfortunately I am unable to add videos to this blog, but it is really a cool sight to see. The packaging advertises that designs 3 inches around shrink to 1 inch, and become 9x as thick. When the 3 inch design gets hot enough, the plastic starts to curl up and it *almost* looks like it is going to stick to itself but it doesn’t! After a minute or so it flattens out and is just a shrunk version of the original. I baked our shrinky dinks a little less time than was suggested, because they were definitely done shrinking and I had a long line of ones to go into the toaster oven. Here is a very proud kiddo with her finished products!

The shrinky dinks I ordered were a little different than the ones I remember from my childhood. I remember using colored pencils because the shrink paper was coarse on one side, and the paper I ordered was smooth and suggested permanent markers. Totally fine and it worked *great* it was just not what I was expecting. The link to the shrinky paper I ordered is here. I recommend it!

I also opted for plain paper instead of ones with designs printed on them. This was mostly for cost reasons. You can buy shrinky dink sets that come with designs preprinted on them, and then the kiddos can just color them in, but they are much more expensive. I knew that I was probably going to have a good number of kids (we had 17) and I was pretty sure that each shrinky dink would only take them a couple of minutes to color in, meaning I would have needed a TON of designs, and it would have cost a ton of money.

So instead, I printed some common designs on printer paper and then traced them onto the shrinky paper with a black permanent marker. It was tedious work and took me almost 100% of my down time on the day of the program, but it was perfect. I had three different sheets with designs:

Sheet 1:

• Butterfly
• Heart
• Flower
• Cupcake
• Fish
• Rainbow

Sheet 2:

• Pokemon Pokeball
• Minecraft Creeper
• LEGO Block
• LEGO Person
• Basketball
• Baseball Bat

Sheet 3:

• Christmas Tree
• Gingerbread Man
• Christmas Lights
• Candy Cane
• Santa Hat
• Snowman

Here are some examples of the shrinky dink designs:

I didn’t get a lot of photos of this program because I was trying to get everyone’s shrinky dinks into the toaster oven as quickly and fairly as possible. I let them do as many as they wanted (within reason) but made them stop about 10 minutes before the program ended so that I had time to bake them all. We also gave them the option to have a hole punched in their shrinky dink (BEFORE baking) to run a string through to put it on a necklace, or to put a magnet on the back.

Here is the single, solitary photo I got of the kids working on their projects:

And here are a couple of photos of the projects in the toaster oven:

You can kind of see in the final picture what I meant about them getting really curly! They flatten out quickly though!

Unfortunately I also didn’t get a ton of pictures of final products, as I was trying to frantically bake the remaining shrinky dinks about the time the other kids were leaving. Here are a few more though!

I will definitely do this program again. It was relatively cheap and easy, and the kids had a great time! It introduced some of them to a brand new activity too and I really love that. Definitely a hit!