HOUMA, La. (AP) — Some have seen quite a few Carnival celebrations. For others, it was their first.

But none had ever seen a string of beads that stretched halfway around the block, so the group of a dozen or so tweens and teens — brothers, sisters and neighbors — decided to create one.

They got together on a recent Saturday and twisted together about 800 beads end to end to make a chain measuring about three-tenths of a mile in length.

All shapes, sizes and colors make up the strand, which measured more than 1,500 feet — the length of roughly five football fields.

‘‘It was so much fun, but it was hard to do,’’ said Amanda Schock, 11.

It all started when Jalen Barrios, 8, and his sister Sydney Barrios, 12, were playing with their stepbrothers, Austin Guidry, 13, and Nathan Guidry, 10, and other neighborhood kids.

‘‘We got bored,’’ Jalen Barrios said, explaining that they started twisting together beads they had on hand. Other kids joined in with their Carnival catches to ‘‘make a big bead.’’

Soon their handiwork stretched up and down the street.

‘‘Then we all thought of trying to beat the world record,’’ said Alyssa Schock, a pretty ambitious goal for a girl who is experiencing her first Mardi Gras.

Alyssa, her twin sister Amanda, and the rest of the family recently moved to Houma from Pennsylvania.

Some quick Internet research led the youngsters to a public attempt to create a record-making bead, a 7,000-foot-plus strand put together in 2006 by the Bacardi Rum Co. designed to help with Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

‘‘But then we looked it up and thought, ’That’s too long to do in one day.’ So we thought we should make one for Houma,’’ Alyssa Schock said.

The group started working about 11 a.m. on Feb. 14 and continued until 4 p.m., stopping when rain started falling. Neighbors kept them supplied with beads and some even lent a hand.

The hardest part was breaking the beads, which they did with their feet, and contending with the sore fingers that resulted from all the twisting, Sydney Barrios said.

They tried to stretch the strand down the street to measure it, an effort complicated by the fact that their bead wouldn’t stay in one piece.

‘‘It would always fall apart when we would tug on it,’’ Amanda Schock said. ‘‘So we’d have to run up and down just to connect the beads.’’

It took an hour, lots of shouted directions and some makeshift repairs to stretch out the massive strand, an effort that left the multi-colored bauble snaking past a fire hydrant, over an upended bike and in front of 15 houses.

The string was too long to measure with the 100-foot measuring tape one family had on hand, so the kids coaxed a reporter to drive alongside their creation and estimate its length using the car’s odometer.

Its makers were exhausted by the effort but happy and surprised by the outcome.

Despite the creators’ shrieks, mom Sian Guidry, 32, said she was thrilled the children worked together so well on the project.

‘‘It gives them something creative to do,’’ she said.

The kids are unsure about their future plans but say they want to keep adding to their bead — maybe this weekend if weather allows — with the goal of having it circle their block.

‘‘We want to try and get it as big as we can,’’ Troy Hower, 11, said.

‘‘It feels exciting,’’ Sydney Barrios said. ‘‘I just really want to see how far this can go.’’

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Information from: The Courier, http://www.houmatoday.com