by Veena Krishnan

Created on: January 27, 2009

Kid's magazines for that matter any magazine can be recycled and used for teaching a variety of concepts. When I had to keep my children occupied during the hot summer afternoons during their summer break I put the big stack of children's magazines that had accumulated over the years to good use.

The simplest activity that both my children especially the younger four year old thoroughly enjoyed was making mosaic using the the colourful pages. I would draw the outline of simple drawings (bunch of flowers, or a big butterfly) and they would fill the outline using the pages of the magazine. They would have to tear the page in to small bits and stick the piece filling up the drawing. If they ran out a particular colour they would have to use other shades of the colour available and thus create a picture with different hues. This same activity can be varied by crushing the paper and sticking crushed paper instead of keeping the bits of paper flat. Crushing the paper would give the drawing a realistic 3-D effect. My older child wanted to use crushed paper only for the centre of the flower and created a very nice effect. Instead of colouring in the drawings with colour pencils they 'coloured' it in by sticking colour paper.

Another activity which I did with my kids was papier mache. This was a modification of the method usually used to make the papier mache articles. My children made colourful vases. I cut the top end of a plastic bottle so that I had a cyclindrical vase with the bottom end intact. We tore up the magazine paper into thin long strips. Then using glue we stuck the strips of paper on the plastic bottle. After we had covered it fully we left it to dry. We stuck a minimum of three layers on the bottle allowing each layer to dry thoroughly before sticking the next layer. After the final layer a generous coat of glue was applied and once again left to dry. The vase was now ready to paint. They used oil paints and finsihed their vases with their own designs. Smaller sizes were made and used as pen holders.

We also used the magazine to collect pictures of animals. When we had a big enough collection we were able to sort them out into jungle animals and farm animals. We then made two charts of jungle and farm animals and painted in the trees in the forest and the farm house and grassy meadows. The charts adorned the walls of the children's room for many months.

Thus the sky is the limit in what one can do with children's magazines depending on the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the home teacher.

Learn more about this author, Veena Krishnan.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.