Day 125: reuse it letter hunt

(Did you see that video I posted earlier? NO? Scroll down and WATCH! It is amazing!)

Alphabet/letter week continues at our house!

We are working on letters and she is really into scissors right now. Trying to combine those two things and I remembered an activity that I had seen out in blog world a while ago. A great reuse it activity and an very easy one.

I got some magazines form our big recycle box, scissors and glue. The idea is to focus on one letter at a time, finding them in the magazine and then cutting them out. I wanted her to be able to have some place fun to keep all the letters that she found and a notebook just wasn't neat enough. So I made her a little recycled notebook (see Nitty Gritty for how to make the "TLC" book that is in the picture below).

Sam LOVED this activity. She actually understood what we were doing and really got into it. I know I probably should be working on the letters in the correct order but her interest right now is in the letters in her name so I am just going with it. We searched for S, A and M.

This is the S page!

By the time we got to M, which Sam struggles with a bit, she was starting to lose focus, but we had already worked on the project for almost a half hour! I was pretty proud of her.

Our little book has more pages so as she learns new letters and gets more interested we will do more pages of letters.

____________________________________________________________________________________

The Nitty Gritty!

Got this idea from here. A great place to get ideas for educational and fun activities.

The book starts out as a box of some sort. The size of the box doesn't matter, the bigger the box the bigger your notebook will be. But it should be the cereal, cracker, granola bar type box (not the real stiff cardboard). You only need one side of the box; cut it out and fold it in half. This will be the front and back cover of your notebook. Poke three holes along the fold (top, middle and bottom). Then cut some regular paper to be just slightly smaller than the size of the notebook (when the front and back cover are layed out flat).

Poke holes in the paper that line up with the holes in the cardboard. Weave the string through the holes back and forth and end with both ends on the inside of the book to tie the knot.Try and have a long length of string left over that you pull back through the middle hole so that you can wrap the string around the book and tie it closed if you want.

This is the front of our book.

And this is the back.

Isn't that cow adorable? Love it!

Sorry if this tutorial is a bit hard to follow. The string is the hardest part to explain but if you just play around with it for a bit you should be able to make something work.

These books are fun to do make with older kids or school groups so that they can use them for journaling, homework assignments or observations while they are outside.