Art of all sorts is very important to raising well balanced kids…and a quasi-sane mama.    I, therefore, have often turned my big green eye away from any of its less then green aspects. We’ve always been big about using the backs of paper, letters, envelopes, boxes, even paper packing material for drawing and enjoy making musical instruments out of would-be recyclies, but that is about as green as we get in the world of art.  The other day, as I was prying out yet another dried up wad of Play Doh from the heater and tossing it and its respective plastic container in the trash, I thought perhaps it is time to explore some greener options. I did a little research and came up with two very doable and fun greener art options for the little ones.

First…Recycling Crayon Nubs

Now…we don’t seem to end up with a ton of nubs.  My kids are pretty good about using them pretty close to up and then they often fall victim to the vacuum.  The crayons ….not the kids.  But it is still a really cool idea for not only getting a little more wear out of the crayons, but also serves as a really cool art project and science lesson in one. Teensygreen gives detailed instructions for this one.

Homemade Play Doh

Now this is a big saver for us. My 2&1/2 yr old has secret stashes of Play Doh all over the house…which I only find moments after they have hit that awful so-crusty-no-kid-will-use-it point of no return. I found a great collection of recipes on an occupational therapy website. My kids loved making this mock Play Doh. We tried the no cook version and had great success except for the coloring part. I forgot to mix it into the water and tried to kneed it in post dough…but that just colored everyone and everything blue.  Our Blue Period we’ll call it.  You can easily skip the food coloring if your kids will allow it and still have a really cool dough.  Did I mention you can eat it?  Don’t like the way that alien you sculpted is looking at you? Bite its head off.

We’ve made definite progress but there is still one major art supply that adds A LOT of plastic waste to the ol’ garbage: markers. My kids love them and aren’t spectacular about putting the caps back on tightly so many end their walk on this earth depressingly early.  (We are working on the cap issue.)  Yes…they could use crayons or pencils which have greener paths, but they LOVE markers…the vibrancy, the glide, the ability to give each other very convincing mustaches.  Really at a loss with this one.   Anyone have a green marker alternative ideas? I would love any other green art options that anyone has tried.  It has been a long ass winter trapped inside, people…and frankly I’m running out of ideas to keep the little runts from eating each other for fun.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 4:33 pm and is filed under family, product review, projects, recycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.