Garbage Art Teaches Creativity

The word of the week in our character development series is “creativity.” Today, garbage art teaches creativity to your kids. If you are not familiar with my character development series, please hover over the character development tap to find all the traits we have been working on for almost two years. There will be 7-8 activities under each trait. I’d love to have you join along and want to hear about your journey. Sometimes I wonder if my kids have too much creativity. They are the kids that come up with a plan. You walk into a room and say, “Wait. What is going on? What are you doing?” They have a weird, elaborate plan that you, as a parent, aren’t sure is a good idea. They were doing something crazy the other day. I looked at my friend with wide eyes, and she just smiled and said, “It’s your fault.” She’s right. Not only do we do this kind of stuff, but they have my genes. I’m the kid whose parents left her alone in her room for a while, and she tore down all of the wallpaper to reveal the lavender paint underneath and then proceeded to take her watercolors and hand paint the room with her own Jr. High style designs. My parents embraced my creative bent, so I guess I should embrace some of the crazy ideas I see my kids pursuing. Today, it was in a controlled situation, and they had a lot of fun.

I have been collecting our clean garbage this week. I’ve cleaned things out and stored them in bags in the laundry room in anticipation for this activity.

I laid out a disposable plastic table cloth (this has received a lot of use as I often use it for art projects) onto the kitchen floor and revealed their art supplies. I explained that they could use any of the materials seen on the ground for the structure of what they might want to build. I said I would be armed with a glue gun to help them make it happen, but they would need to show me exactly what they wanted. They could use scissors or ask me for help with scissors too.

The girls wanted to get to work trying to think up structures right away. I gave them some ideas (animals, buildings, robots, dinosaurs), but they used none of my examples, which I was pretty excited about.

It was great how they could envision things out of the garbage pretty easily.

I wanted to give you a glimpse into our hot glue station.

After the structures were completely built, I brought out the paint and markers to add the finishing touches.

Of course they loved the painting too.

Little man had held back playing by himself in the living room. However, when Corban heard paint, he came running. Therefore, I just had him painting some of the boxes, which satisfied him just fine.

Abby was the master mind behind the person she created.

Kenzie decided to make a whole lake scene with two boats and a dock.

Abby made this car too.