5 Fun Uses for Recycled Milk Caps

My boys drink a lot of milk. In the kitchen windowsill, I have a vase, but instead of having flowers in it, the vase is consistently full of milk caps. These milk caps often come in handy for various creative endeavors and learning activities. You could also use recycled bottle tops for most of these as well. Here are 5 of our favorite ways to play and learn with recycled milk caps:

• Story Props: We made Milk Cap Pumpkins for some Halloween Storyboxes (or an Outdoor Pumpkin Scavenger Hunt), and the boys loved our Itsy Bitsy Spider Storytelling Prop.

• In Sensory Bins: Blue Milk Caps were a main item in our Little Blue + Little Yellow Sensory Bin, our Milk Cap Pumpkins were a nice addition to a Fall Sensory Bin, and I often use milk caps to add letter elements to bins las I did with our Cornmeal Sensory Play. 

Memorial Day/Flag Day/4th of July Sensory Bin in Progress.

• For Literacy Activities: We used our Milk Cap Letters for the Giant Tablet we made for Screen Free Week, one of Wild Thing's favorite learning toys made from a recycled cardboard box and a mini muffin tin. We also created a Milk Cap Word Search for key words we were learning along with a book a couple of months ago. (Tip: Look for muffin tins at thrift stores - that is where we get all of ours).   

• For Baby Play: When Caterpillar was little, I often did simple play activities with him involving milk caps, often with Egg Cartons or Muffin Tins  (we also had some fun with the milk jug too!) 

• For Arts and Crafts: We often use milk caps or bottle tops when an art piece or crafty creation needs wheels, as was the case with our Thomas the Train Craft and our Cardboard Fire Truck. We also recently used the milk caps in place of paintbrushes along with recycled toilet paper rolls. The boys loved making circles with the milk caps and toilet paper rolls and then rolling through their circles too. I LOVED their art piece and loved even more that it involved entirely recycled materials (and that the paint was even homemade), so this art activity could be done COMPLETELY with stuff you probably already have at home. Perfect! (No extra money spent or extra trips to the store). (Here is the paint recipe from The Imagination Tree that we used).  

Here is our painting set up.
(the food coloring has not been added to the paint yet). 

Here is the finished "painting." 

The rest of these photos are of the process,
including clean up, which was just as fun for them.

Also, when I originally shared our Giant Tablet for Screen Free Week, I expected that another tablet would be in the works (by the way - we call our table the Humanoid 1.0, since daddy has a Droid). Rather than creating another tablet, Wild Thing recently started expanding the ways we play with our existing tablet creating, in a sense, new apps! The milk caps also were used in some new ways. 

 Previously, the mini muffin tin was upside down. 
This time, he flipped it over, put the milk caps in it, and then
played a game focused on tossing the ball into the milk caps. 

Next, he decided to try transfer the bouncy ball from cap to cap.

Then we numbered the inside of the milk caps (assigning point values), and he used the block that was attached to the box
(for our previousmeasuring "app") to roll the ball into the milk caps and score points.

Do you use recycled materials for play and art at your house? What are your favorite materials to use? If you use bottle tops/milk caps, how do you use them? Also, what would you add to my evolving Patriotic Sensory Bin shown above? Wild Thing has been cutting the straws into smaller pieces for the bin and cutting the foam pieces. I need to add some white strips so that we can create flags and perhaps some white stars. Anything else that the bin really could use? 

Sharing at: Stress-Free Sunday,  Montessori Monday, Eco-Kids Tuesday, Mom's Library, Artsy Play Wednesday, It's Playtime and Sharing Saturday!

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