I asked Nurit, my son’s nursery school teacher, about these homemade gardening pots this morning at drop off. She said that every year she buys terracota pots for a spring gardening project but this year it just occurred to her to reuse what they had. This is in no way a revolutionary concept at my son’s Berkeley preschool, but it’s still so nice to see yesterday’s garbage reused and reloved. I adore the way the kids decorated them, and are now tending to them with their little spray bottles of water.

In one of the rooms in MakerFaire last year, volunteers handed out goggles, glue guns and hammers to the kids and set them loose in a warehouse piled up with dismantled computers, cables and broken keyboards. Ah, the twin tendencies of destruction and creation, which would my son choose ?

Well, if you know my son you’ll know that I had to forcibly pry each white-knuckled finger off the hammer when it was time to go. He’ll never miss an opportunity to bust stuff up, and this time he was encouraged by adults. The last thing he said before he fell asleep that night was, “that was the bestest day of my life.” I did see plenty of creation going on at MakerFaire though, which made me lament that we didn’t have our own piles of crap lying around.

Happily, we do have lots of piles of crap lying around this week because we’re nearing the end of a kitchen remodel. I labeled a big plastic box “robot parts” and my son spent a day rescuing interesting things from the construction debris. A few days later I helped him glue his robots together with a hot glue gun.

These are not the sturdiest of robots and they don’t do anything except tilt over, but the point was spending time together, and giving our trash a few last whirls as toys. And he’s got plans: the robots still need arms, a microphone for a mouth maybe, and some sort of legs. As I try to do more often, we’re keeping on eye on the trash.

Homemade playdough will last for many, many months in a sealed Ziplock bag, and it takes less time to make it at home than to drive to the store for the brand name stuff. We used neon food coloring for the batch pictured above.

• 2 cups of flour
• 1 cup of salt
• 1 tablespoon cream of tartar
• 2 cup of water
• 1/4 cup solid oil, like Crisco
• Food coloring

Combine the first three ingredients in a saucepan. Stir in the water and the oil a little bit at a time.

Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until a ball forms.

Remove from heat, place dough on table and knead until smooth. Divide into smaller portions and add food coloring.

From Inchmark, a super quick and easy kid’s toy project using mostly recyclables, what’s not to love? I wish I was the type of person who read directions, because Inchmark’s Brooke Reynolds did advise using Tyvek paper for the sails, for example from a USPS Priority Mail envelope. These would not have fallen apart like my construction paper sails (above) did after a few capsizings (it’s the plural of capsizing, I checked!) in the water table.

Besides the sails, you’ll need a wooden skewer and some colored electrical tape for each boat. Pushing the skewer all the way through the juice box so that it protrudes about an inch under the boat helps with the stability of the finished boat. A coin taped to the bottom could help too, as Inchmark recommends, but my little seaman found he didn’t need it. Happy sailing.

My friend Elana forwarded me a link to the site Origami Mommy. We both fell in love with this handsome truck, made from a milk carton, wooden skewers and plastic water bottle caps. Origami Mommy lives in Japan, where making toys from recyclables just seems more commonplace. She scanned a page for her readers from the Japanese book that she got the idea from, which is filled with tiny pictures of ingenious toys made from cans, bottles and other recyclables. All in Japanese, and so small I could barely make them out even with my nose an inch from the monitor. But you could tell, there is some hardcore recyclable toy-making going on in Japan.

Making the truck was easier than I thought. I made the one above in about an hour and gave it to my four year old when he got back from school. Amazingly, he loved it, played on the floor with it for about a half an hour, then brought it downstairs with him to watch a movie. I didn’t think it could compete with his Star Wars ships and Hotwheels cars but I was tickled to be proven wrong. “It’s not really a dump truck, is it?” he asked thoughtfully. “It’s a milk truck, made from a milk carton. Tomorrow I’ll make something for you.”

Cut a milk carton approximately as shown.

Poke holes through four same sized plastic bottle caps. Insert two wooden skewers into two of the bottle caps, these will be the wheel axles.

Hot glue or tape two straws to the bottom of the milk carton, slightly shorter than the carton’s width. Thread the skewers through the straws and attach wheels to the other side.

My son is the type of kid who likes to break tiny things into even tinier things. I don’t understand the motivation, but who am I to dictate how he spends his down time? Recently I found a rice cake I’d given him, broken down into individual pieces of puffed rice in a small pile on his play table. More often than not, it’s a newspaper torn to tiny pieces in some corner of the house. Occasionally, it’s bit pieces of crayons.

When I think of it, I’ve saved the little bits of crayons in a Ziplock bag until there’s enough for a few good chunk-sized crayons, and then leave them in the sun on a hot day in an ice cube tray. If the weather cooperates, I flip over the ice cube tray and we have chunky brand new crayons – hopefully for actually coloring with this time – by day’s end. If not, a few minutes in the microwave does the trick as well.

I remember reading that back in the 70s a canned pea manufacturer came under criticism for omitting the directions from a can of peas. After enduring enough complaints from consumers, the manufacturer put the directions back on the can. The directions were, “Empty contents into saucepan. Heat.”

I was reminded of this story after seeing this “Rubber Band Ball Kit” for $6.75 at The Spoon Sisters. The kit comes with directions! I don’t have the kit but allow me to venture, “Wrap a band around a small ball. Repeat.”

Break out of the playdate rut with this simple activity.  A can of shaving cream costs a little over two dollars, and is a whole afternoon of outdoor messy/clean fun. Come on, do you really want to hear the soundtrack to Toy Story again? Keep those preschoolers guessing – who knows what kind of unusual activities await them at your house? As my husband likes to say, “if they’re not crying when they leave the playdate, we haven’t done our job.”

Adding food coloring or glitter to the shaving cream creates added pizazz. Simple clean up with a hose.

My son’s beloved preschool teacher, Jodi, made batches of this colored rice last year as an alternative to sand for the nursery school playtable and the kids played with it for weeks. At our previous preschool, the colored rice was eventually rolled onto juice cans which had been covered in glue to make pencil holder gifts for Mother’s Day.

At home, I used a ten pound bag and divided the rice into four one gallon Ziplock bags. We dropped a different color of neon food coloring into each bag and gave it a really vigorous shake, then combined the whole colorful lot in our big playtable outside. It’ll probably be too much colored rice for us to use for crafts, but a quick Google search indicated that dried rice can at least be composted. Or maybe thrown in a hippie wedding?

Instead of throwing out those ubiquitous plastic eggs after Easter, fill them with sand, pebbles or rice and hot glue them together. I first saw these used as musical instruments for toddlers at our local kid spot, Studio Grow, but never considered making them myself until prompted by a post about making homemade musical instruments at Children’s Music by Nancy Stewart.