The end of January–it’s that time of year where everyone is starting to feel a little stir crazy–especially if you live in Boston like I do and there are mini snow mountains out side everywhere! Time to break out some good inside activities! One of my friends was talking the other day about needing something to keep her twin girls busy w/o breaking the bank. I thought this is probably a common problem right now so I wanted to pass along the information I gave to her!

One of my favorite free craft items idea comes from a  Cap Catcher Article by Shara of Mommy Perks. In it she talks about her friend Barbara and how she came up with the ingenious idea of using Bottle Caps (from any type of bottles–think milk jugs, bottled water, Pop/Soda, etc, which cannot be recycled) in classrooms. I thought it was a great article and a wonderful idea so I immediately started “catching caps”. When I read her article  Where Our Plastic Goes  it made even more sense why collecting caps, plus recycling our other plastics, was so important!

Then once you  collect all those bottle caps (I got a *huge* collection very quickly!) here’s what you can do with them!

Bottle Cap Games for Kindergarten Readiness ~ going to do some of these with my almost 3 year old later on today!

Personal Child Stories Book about Bottle Caps ~ Written for early learners and teaches about the “3 Rs” as well as gives ideas for using caps with toddlers/young children.

I’ve come up with my own ideas as well! As you can see in the pictures when my daughter was too young to do the structured activities (about a year ago) I still let her play with the caps by giving her them, bottles, water, and a spoon. Although this might seem random even this kind of free play teaches many things!

On top of all that she loved playing with them and spent tons of time using it nearly daily. Now that she’s older I do a different variation of the same thing by filling up her baby brother’s bath tub and letting her play with them in it on the kitchen floor. The best part of it was ever single one of these “toys” was free and something I would have normally thrown away!

So beat those winter blues with some fun Bottle Cap Ideas!