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Tuesday Tip – Twice as Nice
We’ve been learning about the three R’s – reduce, reuse, recycle – for years now, and sadly, it is finally chic enought that everyone is doing it. But better late than never right?
The future lies in the kids, so tap into the wonderful creativity of childhood and turn your recyclables into wondrous works of art or tools or toys. You’ll be surprised what your kids will play with. When we visit great-grandma, she’s always saving those cardboard oatmeal cylinders, plastic butter tubs and shoeboxes for the boys to make instruments and building blocks out of. She strings large rubber bands across the tops, and voila, guitars are born. Lids added make for drums, that they play with for hours. She’ll cut holes out of the sides of boxes, and they become space-ships, super hero strongholds, and cars. Those plastic butter tubs in various sizes make great sorting and stacking toys, not to mention perfect storage containers.
If you buy your detergent in bottles, recycle the bottle, but hang onto the measuring cups. They can be used for sand toys and holding small items like crayons. They also make great stamps for little hands to hold. Cut up old sponges into shapes like stars and circles, and glue them to the back of the cups using water-insoluable adhesive (so the sponges don’t come off when you wash them off).
The next time you purchase a large appliance, hang onto any big Styrofoam pieces. It can be carved up and painted into a sculpture. Make sure you, not the kids, are doing the cutting, you’ll need a sharp blade if you don’t want a thousand little pieces floating around.
Make necklaces and bracelets by stringing packing peanuts on yard or string with a blunt yard needle, then paint each “bead” with non-toxic tempera paint mixed with a small amount of dish-washing liquid. This allows the paint to stick to the slick surface of the peanuts.
If you are looking for great recycling project ideas, look no further that your local children’s museum. Ours is the “Recycling King”, when it comes to using recyclables for art projects. We’ve made mobiles from old CDs, wire hangers and yarn; built rockets out of take-out boxes and paper towel tubes; made collages from melting shaved crayons between wax paper; done papier-mâché with newspapers and milk-gallon jugs; made buttons from the lids of frozen-juice cans; I could go on and on.
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It is good to know that there are many people who cares for our environment. By just segregating our garbage, it is one way of helping our environment and also when people recycle things and make use of it instead of throwing it and add pollution to our environment.