Paper Projects ~ Magazine picture books

 Where do the months go?!!!

I thought April had just begun and now it is the 10th and already 1/3 over. Oh well, life flies by but we will try to enjoy every moment as it passes.

 This month I said I would have a new theme of repurposing items. As we have oodles of paper things around here -tell me we aren't the only ones who seem to quickly get over run with newspapers, magazines, junk mail, sale adds, used up school work pages and more - I decided that would be the are of repurposing that I would concentrate on.

  Even though I have tried to stop the flow of paper when I can (we have cut down on subscriptions) and we take it regularly to the normal recycling- we still have ample supplies for projects!

   Paper projects are fun because you actually can make them very intricate and fancy or you can just let your kids have fun with all of these paper scraps and see what they create. Lord willing, I will be sharing both adult and kid projects this month. Today's project is a kid one.

 Megan has been learning how to read this year and lately she has really taken off and has been enjoying reading what she can, doing a lot of writing of words and whenever she can have some time on the computer she absolutely loves (rather passionate about it in fact!) typing out the stories that she writes.

 Megan's most recent story (hot off the press just this evening) is titled "The Big Clump of Hair" (complete with a picture of Dot with a very large hair-do). It beings like this: "Do u see a hat?" said Dot. "Is it brown?" said Sam. "No" said Dot, "It is white."  and it goes on from there with much conversation between Sam and Dot but no mention of the big clump of hair (and very little punctuation).

 We have been quite enjoying this story writing phase. As Megan writes her stories she knows how to spell some of the words from memory or sounds them out but many she asks for help with in spelling or she was copying out of her reading book (she didn't copy the story just words from here and there). While over and my parents a while back it was discovered that a little alphabet book with words and pictures was very useful for her for her writing.

 When we got home she was wanting something like that and then I had a "brilliant" idea for her to make her own book. I stapled some pages together and then she cut out lots of pictures from a magazine and glued them in and then she wrote the names of all the pictures (with spelling help from me) next to the pictures. That has allowed her to add all sorts of variety to her stories which she enjoys. Aaron thought the project looked fun and decided to make a book to which he figured Megan could then use. As he is still a beginning speller (it hasn't come so easily for him) this was good practice for him to sound things out and write them down too.

This was a rather fun recycling project and it has been good for learning too. I hope all the rest of our projects go as well!  Would your little one enjoy a project like this? Even if they are before the reading stage they still might have fun cutting and gluing. It can make a bit of a mess but not that bad and it is pretty cheap entertainment.