Learning Activities using Recyclables

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Since it is Earth Day month this month, I put together 28 ideas on how to use recyclables for learning activities. There are many more ideas around the web, but these are some of our favourites, tried and loved!

Make letter recognition fun with a letter hunt using newspaper.Use egg carton as building blocks or use it to organize letter cards during word building (plus a little hack to teach beginning and ending of words).

Get counting with acorns and a large egg carton or use sticks and TP rolls.

Reuse a box like this Cardboard laptop for spelling words or make a parking garage for cars practicing directionality.
Puzzles from recyclables, a genius idea to make your own frugal puzzles and to read environmental print too!

Make fine motor spinning tops from bottle tops and coins. Also, use a wipes container and lids as a fine motor toy for baby.
Another fun idea with bottle tops: fine motor net fishing. See even more ideas on How to play with bottle caps.

Here is more fine motor fun using cardboard rolls and pompoms.

Use cardboard rolls for a game of alphabet ping pong drop or cardboard roll words, perfect for phoneme manipulation.

Reuse those little cups with these K-cup activities ideas.
Learn Days of the week with popsicle sticks or practice literacy knowledge with this fun sight word game and synonyms and antonyms idea, also made from popsicle sticks.
Make a Ring Toss game from cardboard rolls and paper plates, work on colour recognition while estimating distance.

Use those flips tops from wipes to practice phonics or if you can get your hands on these lovely bottles used in this Shapes game, perfect!

Make a balancing scale using an old clothes hanger and some recyclables, great for outdoor learning too!
Mix colours using a slide and some things that can roll out of the recycling bin.
Another fun idea to make for baby is this textured surprise board, using bits and pieces.

Oh and don’t forget the baby milk tins(see 9 ideas)!

Build a town from recyclables or use it to make story props likes we did for The Gruffalo.

So many fun ideas on how to use recyclables for learning, right? Best of all, it is frugal and “green” too!