♻️Recycled 🖼Arts and Crafts

Below I will share some of our recycled arts and crafts children did, using materials you probably have at home. There is nothing more exciting than turning “rubbish” into art while challenging creativity and inventiveness!

♻️Recycled💦Water Bottle Person Craft

This Green Craft is Julia’s creative project in its entirety! If you have a recycled plastic water bottle, some loose parts, and sprinkles of creative imagination, you can make it too!

Cut the bottle and half, and offer your child to envision a person’s face. Offer beads, feathers, recycled bottle caps, yarn and other loose parts to decorate the face. Insert one cap into the other to create a 3-D effect.

Offer your child to reduce our carbon footprint in our landfills by recycling and creating! “A child who concentrates is immensely happy,” said Dr. Maria Montessori, and a child who creates during such concentration process is blissful!

---

♻️Recycled🍾Champagne Cork Puppets

Are you not sure what to do with all the recycled champagne corks? Well, how about DIY puppets! All you need is Sharpies and a sprinkle of imagination! 

♻️📦Recycled 🎸Guitar  🖼Art

Turning newspaper and packaging materials into a piece of Art. This is a project Julia did when she was six years old. She had chosen the recycled materials and arranged all the pieces independently, making a guitar still life piece of art. This project was completely child-led! No adult supervision! 

♻️📦Cardboard Mask

This mask is 👧🏻Julia’s independent contribution to ♻️📦our Cardboard week!

All you need is  📦cardboard, ✂️️scissors, a glue gun, 🎨paints, and a ✨sprinkle of imagination!

Julia actually used 🎨 watercolor paints, which are non-toxic and amazingly brilliant to lay over the cardboard! You would think they are acrylic 😱

  ♻️ Recycled 🚽 TPP    Penguin Craft

Another child-led ️craft in its entirety! We are having a ️heat wave so there is nothing more enticing than pulling a frozen  Antarctica tray from a freezer! And since it’s CARDBOARD week, Julia made this penguin from a  recycled toilet paper roll. All you need is black construction paper, googly eyes and pink paper for the feet.  (Julia, 8 yo, Summer camp 2018.)

 ♻️Recycled Land 🐢Tortoise

This is another of Julia’s creations from a paper plate and recycled packaging. After coloring the plate green, apply plenty of glue to have the shell harden and with a little touch of googly eyes, your tortoise can be a perfect addition to your South America unit study. (Summer camp 2018, South America study.) See our  🌎Geography 101 Kids Activities 📽Series 🎇here.

♻️Recycled🍾Cork ☘️Shamrock 🎨Stamping Art/Craft

The next time you will be having 🍾champagne, save the ♻️corks and make 👆🏻this ☘️Shamrock craft! Just tie three corks with a green pipe cleaner to represent the leaves of a Shamrock. Then dip your “Shamrock stamp” into the green washable paint and apply to the paper. We used this tempera paint to draw a stem. For more St. Patrick’s hands-on fun activities, see here ☘️St. Patrick’s Day Kids Activities. 

---

Teachers Appreciation 🌺Gift

Summer is officially here, and Julia had her last day of school this week. We gave out to teachers these 🌺flower pots with her🖐🏻🖐🏻 handprints as a token of appreciation for all the hard work they do in helping our children 🌸bloom! Julia used jumbo washable ink pads to make the prints (just interpose one handprint over the other to give the flower more “petals”), and she then colored the popsicle sticks ~ ala “stems” with tempera paints which dry super quick and we simply inserted the hand-print into the pot. Make sure to laminate your handprint for long-lasting durability. 

---

 Emotions Puppets ♻️🚽DIY 

 

See here a video of Adrian making Emotions (Body) • Feelings (Mind) ✂️DIY 😃😮😡😢☹️😆Puppets ♻️🚽Craft 🎥 101

I also made this EMOTIONS puzzle where a child has to match the two parts of the face. Make sure you color-code on the back of each piece by placing the same-color sticker on each of the two halves that make the whole. (For example, the 😡angry face, will have two 🔴🔴red stickers on the back of each half ~ this way, the child can self-correct.)

Here is a little modifiation~ I hot-glued the EMOTIONS face puzzle to cut in half toilet paper roll (TPR) and color-coded on the back with stickers. For example, the excited face will have two green dot stickers (one on each half) and I also added the written emotional state “excited” to promote reading. For the presentation, I am using a bamboo dish rack and since the pegs are short, I “elongated” them by placing a cut recycled paper wrapping roll over. Present to your child all the puzzle pieces mixed up and offer to match the top of the face to the bottom and also to match the written emotion -word if your child is reading. (With smaller ones, start with just three emotions at a time). As a control of error, all TPR puzzle pieces are matched color coded on the back.

🌳Forest Habitat DIY ♻️Recycled 🚽DIY

See here🐦Birds 🌳Forest Habitat DIY ♻️Recycled 🚽Toilet Paper Craft with 🔢Math Twist

•PROCESS 🖼ART• ♻️🍷3D Girl With a Pearl 👂🏻Earring DIY•

Julia had a school project, which had to be based on a famous piece of art and the requirements were to make it 3D (three -dimensional) model from familiar or recycled materials. We are all long fascinated by the mystery of the Girl with a Pearl Earring painting by Johannes Vermeer, so the decision was made! After searching the Pinterest and not finding much inspiration, Julia came up with this 3D model utterly from her imagination: she took a plastic cup and glued corks all around it. She then traced facial features with a Sharpie and glued a pearl “earring” to one side. Thereafter, Julia placed the plastic cup on top of the recycled tissue box, gluing it securely, and decorated it with felt and a silk scarf.  We referenced 13 Artists Children Should Know, a heavily illustrated book featuring the world’s greatest painters, which is an excellent introduction for young readers to artists and their works.

 ✂️DIY Apple 💻Laptop

  See here How To ✂️Make Apple 💻Laptop For Kids From 📦Cardboard 

For more art and crafts, see here  🎨 Arts & ✂️Crafts 101 🎥 Series.