Teaching Your Kid The Concept of Recycling

For over a year, I’ve started to adjust my household to become eco-friendly and practice recycling as much as we can. I know that it has affected my daughter in a positive way because she started to say things like “Oh, we can recycle this!” or “Look Mom, I asked Ate to make paper dolls out of your empty tissue box!”

Teaching my daughter the concept of recycling was fairly difficult because I think she was still too young then and the entire concept was abstract to her. It was still a good practice though because she knows how we do things and how we save and conserve. Fortunately, my daughter’s school actively campaigns for recycling. They have 2 days in a week dedicated in collecting paper wastes which they recycle to produce I think new papers and donate it to less fortunate students at different places in the Metro.

As homemakers, we can make recycling fun and creative for our kids. Here’s some of the fun things I do with my kid to encourage her to recycle:

Reuse papers. My husband’s office print out a lot of stuff for ads, tour packages, etc and they sometimes end up throwing them out when they need new ads to print. I collect those and use it as my test paper during Peaches’ afterschool classes.

Reuse cardboard boxes like tissue boxes, shoe box, tissue roll, etc. We cut them into paper dolls and paper dresses. Peaches likes to paint the cut paper dolls. The tissue rolls, she likes to decorate it and use as a telescope, a microphone, I even saw her cut it into half and drew places and called it a map.

The purpose – where I start – is the idea of use. It is not recycling, it’s reuse.
~Issey Miyake

Paper bags as arts & craft mantle! Saves my table cloth and me a huge mess 🙂

Ice Cream plastic tumblers as toy organizer and holders. We use tin cans too! Saves me from buying those expensive plastic containers.

Artwork as gift wrappers. If your kid is like mine, you have TONS of scribbles and paintings and what nots on paper. You possibly can’t keep them all. Just choose a few of your favorites or take photos of each of them and make the rest as gift wrappers. It’s personalized and NOT PUT TO WASTE!

Recycling should be fun and not be shown or practiced as something that becomes too tedious. When you’re just starting out, don’t be afraid to stray sometimes. We’re not perfect and the main thing is that you’ve started to educate your household about the concept of recycling. With this little step, I hope the Earth can breathe easily with all these people trampling and living on it.

How about you, how do you teach your kids to recycle? Any more tips to add?