Have you ever thought of incorporating recycled items for your kids into your learning activities?
With the beauty of the internet, there are so many creative ideas and uses for anything one can think of! Kids get bored with paper, pencil, and workbooks. There are some amazing learning ideas using bottle caps. You can even teach your kids about repurposing and recycling by saving plastic bottle caps to use in games, learning and more!
ALPHABET MATCH
Alphabet match is a fun hands-on activity for kids to help recognize and learn alphabet letters. You can even introduce the upper case and lower case letters to your child and let them match. This can be a fun puzzle-like activity. You will need a large sheet of paper, 26 bottle tops, colored markers, and foam letters. If you don’t have the foam letters, you can alternatively write the alphabet letters on the bottle tops instead. The foam letters are capital letters and the letters written on the paper are small letters, let your child do the activity and match the two letters together, Aa, Bb, Cc, etc.
SORT COLOURS WITH BOTTLE TOPS
Sorting colours with bottle caps are one of the most fun activities kids would love to do. This activity is sorting bottle caps into groups according to colour using paper plates to group them. You will need a mixture of coloured bottle tops, paper plates. You have to write the colour name on the paper plate to promote reading and connecting the word to the colour. Sorting colour bottle caps reinforce and extend learning about colours and also develop fine motors and eye-hand coordination.
MAKE YOUR OWN BOTTLE TOP MONEY
Play/toy money does not last for long, it either gets lost or gets as the coins are normally quite small. Kids love to play with pretend money and use it in their imaginative play games, so you can make your very own money using milk bottle tops and printable coins that are easily available at home. Pretend money is a great way to introduce the concepts relating to money and value. You will need grey/silver and yellow paper, 24 bottle caps of different sizes and the free printable. Paste money stickers, or number them with a marker. Mark them as 1 rupee, 5 rupees, etc. Then have your child pretend to go to a shop and buy something he or she likes. You can even have your child carry these when you actually go out; they can pretend to hand over money to the shopkeeper.
TEACH THEM TO COUNT
Make your child learn to count with bottle caps. This for sure one major concept mothers want their children to learn. You will need bottle caps, a bowl, and a marker. Mark each bottle cap till the number count you want to introduce. There are various ways you can incorporate counting and recognition of the numbers as well. Put them all in a bowl, randomly call out a number and ask your child to find and pick it out.
The bottle caps are robust, strong and great for little hands and fingers to manipulate which is beneficial for their fine motor development. Fine motor is important for strength and control of the hands and fingers for writing in school age kids. It also encourages the imagination of your child and brings another dimension to creative play. Imaginative play also helps them learn social, practical and lateral problem solving strategies which then can be transferred into the adult world.
