Book Review: Upcycle It! Crafts for Kids

Crafty pro Jennifer Perkins offers lots of ideas for crafts kids can make with materials that would otherwise be on the way to the trash or recycling bins in her book Upcycle It! Crafts for Kids.

The book covers the basic supplies you need to get started making upcycled crafts as well as some of the happy trash you might want to start collecting in order to make the projects.

In all there are 25 projects organized by theme including items for organizing your space, decorating your room, school supplies, adding a personalized touch to objects and making gifts.

There’s a lot of fun stuff here, from a lamp made out of a green plastic bottle to DIY food wraps to a picture frame covered in tiny toys.

The projects are rated for kids 8-12, but there are things even older kids might benefit from being supervised with. Younger kids could also make some of these projects (stamped fabric bags or a T-shirt rug, for example) with help from parents with cutting.

My daughter is 12 and while she has made projects similar to some of these before, I think she’d have a lot of fun with these ideas and be able to do a lot of them herself. Whether with a parent’s help or crafting solo, these fun ideas are sure to get kids a little more interested in what’s going into the recycling bin and how those items can be creatively reused.

About the book: 114 pages, 25 projects, paperback. Published by Rockridge Press March 2022. Suggested retail $12.99

With little kids especially, linking learning to physical activity really does help them learn. Movement can help kids focus, and it just keeps them from sitting still all day, which isn’t good for anyone.

The good news is lots of different learning activities can be adopted to get kids moving while they learn, so let’s look at some math and number activities that use gross motor skills.

Probably the most obvious thing would be hopscotch, which helps kids count while they hop. You can also mix up the numbers, do skip counting with the numbers, give kids a simple math problem and have them hop to the correct answer, and on and on.

This number hop game from Gift of Curiosity is a more chaotic version, with number flash cards on the floor that kids can hop, skip or jump to as you call them out (this one is more for individual number identification than counting). It’s a great indoor option if it’s too hot, cold or rainy out to do traditional hopscotch, too.

This painter’s tape number line idea from Days with Grey doesn’t involve quite as much movement, but kids can move around while they place things on the number line and work on learning about one to one correspondence. In the blog post they use shoes, but you can count anything you’ve got handy. (Be warned when I visited this website had an ad that continually took up the whole page, but you can get the idea pretty quickly.)

One of the important tasks of learning numbers is learning a parent’s phone number just in case it’s ever needed, or how to dial 911 in case on an emergency. Teaching Mama has a great way to practice telephone numbers and get some movement in with a giant telephone keypad made out of paper plates. You can also use this for counting practice, but it’s a great idea for learning phone numbers, too.

Have you read?

Leave a Reply