Would you like to make a fun, original gift that also helps the environment? Recycled materials are the perfect opportunity to unleash your imagination and create lots of toys. Cardboard boxes, plastic caps, straws, cork, everything you can find around the house can help you get creative and make personalized, economical, and very fun toys for children.
Also, by doing this you will be instilling in your children the importance of recycling and reusing. By the way! If you like crafts, we also have a very fun post about how to recycle old jeans step by step.
Original recycled toy ideas for children
If you also want to give a second life to waste and at the same time have a lot of fun designing and doing crafts with the little ones at home, in this post we suggest 7 ideas to make toys with recycled materials. Join the Planet First!
An airplane with toilet paper rolls
The first thing you need to design a recycled airplane is to get a few toilet paper or kitchen rolls that you have saved. Take two or four rolls, depending on the size, and open them in half to draw two ovals with a pencil (one should be twice as big as the other). Then take a brush and tempera paint to color each of the ovals you have cut out that will form the airplane wings.
Next, take a fairly long kitchen paper roll and paint it (don't forget to add the windows). It is important to make four holes on each side with a cutter to fit the wings. Then get creative and fill it with color, beautiful designs, and stickers to give it a much nicer touch.
Cardboard foosball table
Another idea we suggest in this post is to make a foosball table. This recycled toy is very simple but very original and fun. You only need a shoebox, some clothespins, and some skewers or long sticks.
Take the shoebox without the lid and make a couple of holes on each side to create the goals. Then make other small holes on each side to fit the sticks. Since it is a toy ideal for two children, four long sticks, two for each, will suffice. Then turn the clothespins into players, personalize them and place them on the sticks. And just like that, you will have a foosball table made with recycled materials for the little ones at home.
A bowling game
If you are not very good at crafts but would like to make a recycled material toy for children, we suggest a bowling game. You just need to gather 6 or 9 Actimel or smoothie bottles. Remove all the labels, paint and decorate each jar in a different color. Then stick on the top a ping pong ball to each jar, which you should have painted beforehand as well. Finally, get a ball and enjoy with your children!
A domino set made of cardboard
If you want to have a good time with your children and enjoy an afternoon full of fun, you can create a recycled board game as fun as dominoes, ideal for children between 6 and 12 years old. For this, simply take a piece of cardboard, trace the outline of each piece, and then paint them with acrylic paint in black. Add in white the dots and lines of the pieces and your homemade domino set will be ready!
A recycled toy car
With a cardboard egg carton and four caps of bottle you can design a fun toy car. The first thing you should do is take the egg carton and paint it. Depending on the size you want the car to be, you can cut it or not. If you want a fire truck, for example, choose an egg carton with at least 8 units. And if you want a British bus glue two egg cartons, one on top of the other, to form the two floors of the bus ;)
Then take as many polystyrene balls as passengers you want to have in your vehicle and bring them to life by decorating and painting them. Finally, take the four plastic bottle caps and glue them to add the wheels to the car made with recycled material.
Recycled puppet
We think this is a great idea to give a second life to the paper rolls and plastic caps. To create your own puppet, you should take a toilet paper roll and paint it the color you want. Then design on paper or cardboard the face of the character or the head of the animal you want to represent. Glue it to the top of the roll and you will have the body and head joined.
Then take four pieces of yarn or strings and glue them to the body to create the limbss. Don't forget to glue the bottle caps at the end of each limb. Finally, add four threads to each limb and tie them to two straws in the shape of an “X” to create the command with which you will control the character. Surely you will have a great time inventing stories. Kids will love it!
Snakes with cork
If you want to know how to make an original recycled toy, pay attention because our last idea is going to delight you. Gather all the bottle corks as many as you can and when you have a few, cut them into three equal pieces each. Then, in each cork piece, you must make a hole with an awl. Pass red yarn through each of the holes, just like if you were making a beaded necklace, and add a knot at the beginning and the end so it doesn't come out.
Don't forget to the head. For that, we recommend you take a whole cork, add some eyes with a marker or stickers and let the yarn stick out a little to imitate the snake's tongue.
As you can see, there are plenty of ideas to make toys with recycled materials that, besides being very economical, will help the environment. If you love crafts or would like to have a good time with your children creating and imagining... What are you waiting for to choose one of these ideas?
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