Every year you find yourself in the same situation. Somehow all those school supplies you bought your child multiplied, leaving you with extra supplies and a headache. Every single day tons of garbage is collected from houses, offices, schools and other organizations. The first thing you should do is try to reuse them the next year or ask your child’s professor if they need extra supplies. Many things that we use in our day-to-day life can be reused, like you can write on both sides of paper and thus save many trees.
‘Reduce, Reuse and Recycle’ is the current global environmental slogan in the present scenario. Recycling literally means reusing dumped items and junk materials by modifying them to create something useful. Recycling is the need of the day because our planet is reeling under the pressure of ‘Global Warming’. Here are some useful ways to recycle your child’s old school supplies and turn them into something more useful.
Old Books:
Trading old books for new ones can be a fun outing. If your child is an avid reader, monthly visits to a second hand store can be a reward. If a book is truly damaged and can’t be giving to charity, sell it at a garage sale or trade it at a second hand bookstore, then teach your child to recycle the pages and the cardboard cover responsibly. Another option would be to create craft projects from torn pages of a book. Cardboard book covers can be covered with fabric to make home made journals.
Old school magazines are treasure house for photographs to decorate your creations or can be stored for use in the school projects. You can cut-out photos and glue them to paper plates and turn them into home decor items. Include your child in this discovery process.
Paper:
Household good like old notebooks, printed sheets and tonnes of paper make their way into the dustbin. Before you throw them out, think out of the box. Many times search for scrap materials to get a science fair project done. Paper recycling knows no bounds. Save the paper for an origami project. Check the old notebooks for unused pages, tear them and make a notebook or a recipe book from them. Paper can also be used as a package material, to wrap fragile materials such as home decors.
Crayons & Colored Pencils:
You can keep worn down crayons & colored pencils in a tool box as marking pencils. They may have lost their nice sharp points, their wrappers may be gone, and some may have snapped under pressure. Believe it or not, they can still color. They may not be suitable for the first day of school, but they’re fine for use at home.
Pencil Boxes:
You can use them to store game pieces or give them to smaller children in your household or neighborhood. They can be also used as a jewelry case or as a box for storing other household materials.
Other Stationery Items:
You can keep rulers near the workbench in case you lose your tape measurer.
Extra scissors always come handy in your day to day activities. They are sure to be of use in your child’s art and craft project. Keep scissors in the kitchen for opening bags and boxes. Shoe boxes can be transformed into panoramas with glued-in miniature toys and crayon-colored backgrounds. If book sacks can be salvaged, they make great over night bags, one day trip bags. For folders I spend a little more when I buy them at first, but I reuse plastic folders. You can either use them around the house for recipes, storage, art projects, or send to school next year. They are very durable. Plastic containers for index cards make great recipe box, great for little things, or can be cleaned and used another year. Highlighters and erasers are hardly ever all used up at the end of the year.
Once you start on the adventure of making your child’s preschool supplies with the old ones you will never look at a box the same way again. You can find innovative ideas in reusing the old ones and also engage your child in the activity. The sky is the limit.
References:
http://www.ehow.com/
http://collegecandy.com/
