Recycling waste requires creative thinking and imagination. This requires collecting material with a perspective and a plan in the head. Recycling waste is a process driven activity and we all know “Creativity is all about the process”. Often, we lay so much importance on the product that the process looses our attention. For example, a child may have followed the process well but at some point one of the process was mismanaged and the product does not turn out as expected.
We need to inspire children to think of ideas to recycle disposable material we use in our daily lives. Let us create opportunities for children and give them enough time to think and come up with innovative ideas.
We need to inspire the young minds and give them enough space and pace to come up with their plan. When children get much inspired to take up recycling projects, their trial and error learning and junk collection can trigger parental worry. Reuse, reduce and recycle were never easy and it can get challenging for parents as children my behave like junk collectors. Creative thinking and imagination with an objective of recycling will also mean collaborating over the ideas and then choosing the best to implement.
Caution is necessary especially, when children begin to show interest to work with tools they have seen but not safe. Parents often feel the pressure to manage their child’s safety but obviously do not want to hamper creativity. Parental over protection can ruin their curiosity and growing interest therefore, it is best to partner them. When parents join as collaborators in the project, it also becomes easy to manage undivided attention to academics and ensure projects are safely handled.
Grape Twig Ornament
This post is presenting a project using grape twigs to create a decorative show piece. Emerging with an eco-friendly product as an end result is a challenge to creativity thinking. Environmental friendly material will mean all that decomposes and this sparks the use of science in creativity.
What would you need?
- Few dried grape twigs
- Paint (golden or silver) and paint brush
- Earthen / ceramic pot (small)
- Beads for decoration
- Glitter Glue
- White adhesive / craft glue
How to work with the material?
- Collect a few twigs that are left over after the fresh grapes from bunch are eaten up.
- Sun dry the grape twigs.
- Have at least 3 -4 twigs because these give variety of natural shapes to your art work and also help fill up the space creatively.
- Pick up one of them and make spots of glitter glue at all the ends where there would have been grapes.
- Drop big enough spots of glitter glue because they may shrink on drying up and become tiny or less visible .
- Subsequently, after that pick up the next twig, paint it well using a colour of your choice and leave it to dry for sometime.
- Now, with the third twig, paint it golden or silver using a paint brush and let it dry up.
- Apply adhesive glue / white glue on the ends where the grapes would have been and paste the beads on the spots of glue.
- Lastly, put all the painted twigs together, by placing them in the earthen /ceramic pot to complete the show piece.
You may also like our post on recycling a plastic bottle. https://timesofpreschool.com/recycle-a-plastic-bottle/