Peanut Butter Jar Storage and Cereal Box Crafts

Megan, a SAHM in Chicago, has a wonderful blog called PlumPudding where she blogs about a variety of crafts for children (among other things).

If you're looking for fun crafts to do with your kids, which use both the recycle and useful themes that we all like to encourage! -- you can wash out your plastic peanut butter containers to use as storage boxes for little treasures like Polly Pockets, Leggos, tiny farm animals, etc., (keep the lids from being lost with this idea).

Cereal boxes are another item well-used by crafty moms (like using the inside as canvases for painting), and Megan shows you how to make bookmarks as well as postcards and envelopes. Remember to round off all corners as the cardboard used in cereal boxes can make them uncomfortably sharp! These are truly green crafting ideas at their best.

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Kids Celebrate Earth Day with Activities and Crafts

From Coffee Ground Fossils (a recycling craft) to 5 tips on how kids can help the planet, Funschool has come up with a nice selection of activities, crafts and games relating to Earth Day (April 22nd).

My kids were recently subjected to a guest lecture at their school that they interpreted to be full of blame, fear and hopelessness. That approach is obviously not helpful in addition to being extremely frightening--adults need to present Earth Day in positive terms of nurturing and caring for something that's very precious and irreplaceable. We need to give our children hope in concrete terms of things they can do to help, such as this partial list from PlanetPals:

Things to do with paper, gift wrap or cardboard:

• Use it to cover and protect your schoolbooks
• Make your own paper dolls be a fashion designer and design doll clothes
• Cover the walls in your dollhouse with gift wrap for wallpaper
• Use bags or newspaper particularly colorful comics, for gift wrap....
• Use old gift wrap, comics or wallpaper to cover boxes or cans
• Use the back side of bags or gift wrap as practice paper for painting or studying the alphabet
• Use your practice paintings as gift wrap--they can be colorful and special!
• Cut it in squares and use it to make origami
• Make a book, or album -- paper pages and cardboard cover -- use string or ribbon to tie it together
• Make homemade paper
• Make paper mache projects

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How to Make Your Own Paper - Kid Friendly Instructions

I just found great instructions on how to make your own paper -- and in this one, you don't need a food processor or even a blender or an iron either. A whisk and a rolling pin will suffice.

Too many of the other recipes call for the use of machines to blend and a hot iron to remove excess water from the pulp, which I don't think is child-friendly enough to really be able to just let the kids "own" this project.

Anyway, the instructions are in PDF format at EcoKidsOnline, which basically tell you to:

• Tear scrap paper into tiny pieces and soak in a bucket of hot water for 30 minutes.

• Take a handful of the soaked paper out at a time and whisk until it is a creamy pulp. Add a small amount of vegetable scraps or dye for color (or even leaves for added texture).

• Pour a inch of water into a pan (in which pan you've already fitted a screen). Pour one cup of the blended pulp onto the screen, and spread evenly.

• Lift screen out with pulp on top; let water drain.

• Lay pulp-covered screen face down on a cloth (tea towel) or in between some newspaper. Lift the screen away, leaving the paper pulp on the cloth. Cover with another cloth. Use a rolling pin to flatten and press out excess moisture.

• Let dry for at least 24 hours.

• Use.

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