Make a loop with your ribbon. Carefully pin the loop into the styrofoam ball. This is for hanging your bauble.
Cut DVDs or CDs into small shapes. Little squares and triangles work best, especially if the sides are less than 1cm in length. The edges aren't usually sharp, but take care just in case. Be careful with sharp scissors too.
Put a tiny bit of glue on the back of your CD shape, this should be the side with the words printed on it. If you're using craft glue, use the smallest amount of glue possible, as the glue will dissolve your styrofoam.
Stick the small piece of cut up CD onto the bauble.
Repeat for the other pieces of CD. Place them next to each other tightly so there are no gaps. Ensure the loop does not get caught under the pieces, so you can still hang the ball.
Now you have a miniature disco ball that you can hang anywhere! With Christmas coming up, you could even hang it on your Christmas tree.
What's happening?
Your disco ball looks pretty because it reflects light. The shiny surface of a CD or DVD is just like a mirror. When light hits a mirror it will reflect off. You've stuck lots of little tiny 'mirrors' (disc pieces) onto the bauble at slightly different angles so they fit around the styrofoam sphere. The light that hits the bauble reflects off those angled pieces in lots and lots of directions, creating a pretty light display.
This is also a good opportunity to reuse old CDs or DVDs. Reuse is when you use an item more than once. Sometimes reuse means using the item for the same purpose, but in this case it's 'new-life reuse' because the CDs and DVDs will be used for a new purpose.
Reuse often gets confused with recycling, but it's quite different. Recycling is when the item is broken down into basic, raw materials which are then used to make new items.
Both reuse and recycling can be good for the environment. It can save the energy and raw materials used to make a new item. This can decrease the strain on global resources and cut greenhouse gas emissions. An increase in greenhouse gases around the Earth causes climate change.
Applications
CDs or DVDs are data storage devices. CD is short for Compact Disc and they've been around since 1982. CDs are used to store digital data. It was originally made to store digital audio, but these days they are also used to back up files. CDs typically store up to 700 MB.
DVD is short for both Digital Versatile Disc and Digital Video Disc. DVDs have been around since 1995 and are mostly used for video and data storage. Although they're physically the same size as a CD, they can store more than six times the data.
If you go to the shops to buy a DVD for storage, you might find some variations on the name, depending on the way they store data. A DVD-ROM has data which can only be read and not written, a DVD-R can be written once and then acts like a DVD-ROM, and DVD-RAM or DVD-RW holds data that can be re-written over and over again.
