School year has started! While I don't homeschool, I do some preschool teaching to my kiddos before they go to school. (You can see some of my other preschool posts at the bottom of the page.) With that, we use a lot of construction paper. When I first started planning and making our projects to do, I realized how much construction paper we were going through, especially when there was a free day of crafting. So I slowly learned some ways to save on that construction paper.
Have you ever seen a kid cut something out of a piece of construction paper? They always cut right in the middle leaving a lot of extra paper left over. This was such a waste to me and I wanted to do something to make sure we could use the construction paper to its full potential.
One of the ways I've done this is by starting a scrap paper bag, any of the paper scraps that are left over from a craft we put in a designated ziplock bag. This way we have scraps for them to use for other crafts. This bag is my go to for when I need to cut out small little eyes, tails, or spots for our letter crafts.
Another way we use this scrap paper bag is for gluing and cutting small pieces. When the girls were learning to cut I would give them the paper from the scrap paper bag and they could practice cutting it up. Also, when Peanut was going through a gluing phase she would take the pieces she cut and glue them to another piece of paper. This saved so much paper, because all she wanted to do was glue over and over and this paper was just paper that was extra.
A second way I saved on construction paper was by giving them less. That construction paper is so large and as I said before kids don't do the best at cutting on the edge. So instead of letting them have the whole paper, I would first cut the paper in half. This worked great for when my oldest was going through a book phase. She loved taking books and then making them using construction paper. She took Brown Bear Brown Bear for instance and then figured out what color each page would be, brown for the bear, red for the bird, yellow for the duck, etc. I loved how she was learning to put things in order, recognize what color would be represented on each page and so forth, but one full-sized construction paper for a circle to represent the bear just seemed like a waste. So we cut the paper in half, it made it the perfect size for a book and she could be creative and re-make the books while I could be content that we weren't using to much paper. Some books we been cut the construction paper into fourths...make it go even further!
Liked this post, you may also like the following
Preschool: Learning to write. Preschool: Letter Art. Preschool: Part 1
PreschooL: Part 2 Preschool: Part 3 Preschool: Part 4
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