Best Out of Waste Ideas: Easy & Fun Crafts for Kids

If you’re looking for some fun and cheap activities to do with your kids, these Out of Waste projects are perfect! These crafts are made from recycled materials as well as stuff you probably already have laying around the house! Easy, fun, and hours of entertainment! These ideas are ideal for preschoolers up through early elementary school!

Necessity is the Mother of Invention (of Out of Waste Projects & Crafts)

As states are starting to open up, you don’t need me to tell you how the past few months have pushed every button and tested every limit, especially with kids underfoot all day long. Homeschooling families might have had a slight edge, but the consensus is that it was hard for everyone.

My background, before I had my twin sons, was a high school English teacher for 14 years. So to say that occupying preschoolers and coming up with things to do is not my wheelhouse…well, it’s a pretty big understatement. There was a reason I chose to teach high school and not early elementary.

But like everyone else, the role of camp counselor | cruise director | daily activities creator fell to me. And let me tell you, there were some days when we had done 3 crafts by 9 am and I was wiped out already.

The bright side of all this, besides the extra time I had with my boys before they start kindergarten this year, is that we landed on a few fun easy crafts and projects that didn’t require a lot of preparation or gathering of materials. In fact, most of our crafts were made out of waste – things we were going to throw out or items we already had hanging around the house.

If you’ve been around the blog at all, you know I’m all about easy and making moms’ lives easier. So, we aren’t about fancy around here, when it comes to kids stuff. Sometimes, we are just about trying to get through the day. Just me?

Best ( & Easiest) Out of Waste Craft Ideas for Kids

The crafts you see are a mix of things that we just came up with on the fly or things I might have spotted on Pinterest or Facebook. I apologize in advance if this is your idea; please let me know and I’ll give you credit. Most of the time, I saw something while scrolling, it stuck in the back of my head, and the boys and I were just winging it. You’ll definitely see from the pictures that we aren’t professional crafters.

And that’s the nice thing about these crafts. Nobody is after perfection. They’re kids. The projects will look like kids did them, and that’s the idea. It’s just about fun, filling the day, and retaining our sanity until bedtime.

The other nice thing is that a lot of these crafts can be done with materials you probably have laying around the house, especially if you recycle. You may want to do a quick run to the store to pick up a few things, but the projects are easy and easily adaptable to what you have on hand.

I’ve arranged them by category, as you can make a couple of crafts with the same material.

Old Cardboard Box

1| Cardboard Box Town

Materials:

Large Piece of Cardboard

Magic Markers, Crayons

Stickers

Juice/Milk Containers (optional)

We’ve done this craft a few times, and it’s really fun. Basically, you’re just drawing roads and creating a town on a big piece of cardboard. The fun part about this was that you can make it look like Main Street in your area. It doesn’t have to be exact or to scale, but it was really fun to talk through with my boys what stores and food places were in our town and where they thought we should put them.

Then, they also added in some things from their imagination… a beach, a pet store… we used stickers and magic markers to decorate, and they had a great time driving their cars around the town. If you have girls, Barbie can cruise around this town, too.

To make our town more 3-dimensional, we took small milk and juice cartons, painted them, and then taped them to the town. The boys had a lot of fun labeling and naming the other buildings in town. You can create doors and windows that open as well.

{If you’re looking for more cardboard crafts for kids, here are 13 more to try!}

The next project is also something you can do with old milk cartons.

Milk Cartons

2| Milk Carton Bird Feeders

Materials:

Milk Carton

Paint and paintbrush

Scissors

String

Birdseed

Another project we did with milk cartons was to make bird feeders. All you need to do it cut a square in the 2 sides of the carton, paint it, fill it with birdseed and hang it from a tree. My boys become obsessed with watching for birds!

For the paint, I’d recommend acrylic, as it will hold up better in the weather. We used tempera paint this time. It took a few coats to cover it decently, but when it rained, it started to come off. Next time.

Toilet Paper Rolls

3| Toilet Paper Roll Bird feeders

Materials:

Toilet paper roll

Peanut butter

Paper Plate

Birdseed

Knife

String (optional)

Here’s another way we made a bird, and this is so easy as well. Spread peanut butter on the outside of a toilet paper roll, sprea birdseed on a paper plate, then roll it in the birdseed.  You don’t even need to hang it. Just slide the roll on to a tree branch.

We actually found it was harder for the bird to eat it when we tried to hang it; sliding it on made it easier for the birds to access it.

4| Toilet Paper Roll Garage

Materials:

Toilet Paper Rolls

Box

Glue

Magic Markers, crayons, etc.

This one made its way around Facebook before we finally got a chance to make it. I’m not sure who gets the credit for it, but it’s so clever.

All you need is a box of any size – a shoebox or larger. As you go through toilet paper and paper towels, save the rolls and layer them in the box. A little Elmer’s Glue is all you need on the areas that touch each other.

They are the perfect size to hold Hot Wheels or Matchbox cars. You can also use it to store magic markers, crayons, or pencils, or any other small collectible your child is obsessed with.

Egg Cartons

5| Egg Carton Creatures (Caterpillars, Ladybugs, Sea Turtles)

Materials:

Egg Carton

Pom Poms

Googly eyes

Pipe Cleaners

Glue

Magic markers or paint

Scissors

These were so fun to make! Save an egg carton and cut out the egg holders. For turtles and ladybugs, just cut out individual holders; for caterpillars, cut them out in sections of 3.  Paint or color with magic markers. Glue on a pom-pom for the head and add googly eyes.  For the caterpillar, poke holes in the top and add pipe cleaners for the antennas.

For the turtles, make 4 holes (2 on each side) and poke 2 shortened pipe cleaners through – one pipe cleaner in the front two holes for the front flippers, one pipe cleaner through back two holes for the back flippers. Once they are through, bend them so they make flippers for the turtle.

Popsicle Sticks

6| Popsicle Stick Bird Feeder

Materials:

Popsicle sticks

Glue

String

Bird feeder

Here’s another take on a bird feeder. You can either save popsicles sticks from ice cream or you can buy a bag of 100 at Dollar Tree for $1. With this one, you make a platform of 10 sticks and glue 2 sticks across the back to hold it together. Then you layer the sticks around, building up a wall.

Cut 4 pieces of string, long enough to go under the platform and up the sides to create a hanger. Glue the string to keep it secure. This is a good tutorial that we followed.

It was fun to hang this one, although I think the squirrels got into it before the birds had a chance!

Masking Tape

7| Masking Tape Town (Legos)

Materials:

Masking Tape

Toys

This was another one I saw making the rounds on Facebook. All you need to do it put masking tape or painter’s tape on the floor to create a town.  Make roads, buildings, parking lots, and a traffic circle. There’s no right or wrong way to put this one together. Your child can even help engineer it.

My sons had a great time putting their Lego buildings on this one as well as having their cars cruise the town.

Paper Plates

8|Paper Plate Nature-Themed Habitat

Materials:

Paper plates

Magic Markers, crayons, etc.

Stickers

This one is totally a hack, but my boys loved this more than I expected! Have the kids color a paper plate to look like a certain part of nature – a rain forest, a beach, an ocean, the dessert. The only real trick is to have stickers planned ahead of time to correspond to the environment.  If you have desert animal stickers, have them make a desert. If you have fish, have them color it blue and make an ocean. If you have monkeys and parrots, have them color it green, draw trees, and make a rain forest.

Broken Crayons

9| Melted Crayon Shapes

Materials:

Broken Crayons

Fun-shaped baking trays

Oven

While being homebound, we did a lot of coloring and totally became Crayola snobs. We had a ton of other crayons we didn’t use, so we decided to mix them up and melt them together. All you need for this is old broken crayons and a fun shaping baking tin.

Break up the crayons, fill the shape (go over the top because the crayons will melt down), put in oven for 15-20 minutes at 150 degrees, and then pop in the freezer when you’re done!

 

Old Food Boxes

10| Food Box Robots

Materials:

Old food boxes

Styrofoam cups

Construction paper

Tape/glue

Scissors

Magic Markers

Googly eyes, pipe cleaners, pom poms (optional)

We had a great time making this craft, and I think it was my sons’ all-time favorite. To put this together, you really just use your imagination! We saved all kinds of food boxes in different shapes – cereal boxes, fruit pouch boxes, snack pack boxes. Then we arranged them how we wanted the robots to look.

We cut out construction paper and glue/taped it to the boxes to cover the writing. Then, we taped the boxes together. The boys decorated the robots before we taped on styrofoam cups for arms and legs.

Depending on how rough your kid is (mine are rough, lol), you may need reinforcements keeping the robots together. We had to re-attach the arms and legs and body parts with tape. I also tried glue and a glue gun. If your robots aren’t battling it out, tape or glue should be sufficient. But ours were in heavy wars and flying around the house, so they came into the shop for repairs many times!

In the end, I just used masking tape right over the top and didn’t even try to hide it anymore. Whatever worked to keep them together. My boys didn’t mind – they liked having robots with battle scars!

Cheap, Easy, Fun Recycled Projects

All in all, we really had a great time doing these projects. Often, they were easy to do, and several of them occupied my sons for long periods of time. And on many days! So, using upcycled free materials, stuff that was waste and garbage anyway, and getting a few toys, activities, and hours of play – I call that a win!

Thoughts? I’d love to hear them! Leave a comment below! If you try any of these crafts, tag me on Instagram @100affections or leave a comment on Pinterest so I can check them out!