Fairy Poop and Other Craft Materials

I save garbage.
What, doesn't everyone save trash for their job?

I have a bin full of paper towel tubes. 

Not TP tubes, though. 
Sanitation rules under licensing say no. 

You can buy unused ones online, made specifically for crafting, or you can save the paper towel rolls and cut them to size yourself.

I save cereal box cardboard, too. 
That same kind of cardboard can be found in pizza boxes and other food packaging. 
If it doesn't have food on it and is clean, I toss it in the tote with the other stuff.

I don't save corrugated cardboard because it's dangerous for kids to cut with scissors. Ever try it? Grab a corrugated box and the nearest pair of kid scissors and try to cut the cardboard. Kid scissors aren't strong enough, so they sometimes break. Corrugated cardboard is hard to cut, so sometimes the scissors slip and can hurt the person wielding them. 

Yes, that is the voice of experience and yes, I've had both things happen to me. 
Even using adult scissors is hard when one has a lot of cardboard to cut.  On one occasion I cut out squares to make 35 cardboard looms. My scissors were sharp but I still ended up with blisters. Corrugated cardboard is tough stuff.

So cereal box cardboard is the thickest stuff we use for building. 
We supplement with card stock and construction paper.

Once in awhile we declare a 'trash day' at my school and I bring in the bins, some masking tape, and let the kids just make stuff. 

In April, our company decided we were going to have an Earth Day fashion show and make outfits out of recycled materials. Er, trash. Make the outfits, take photos, get them posted on social media.

The request was sent out via our app six days before the project was due, asking people to bring in their trash. 
No one did.

Most people (people who aren't me) don't hoard trash all year long. 
I think there were six kids who managed to make something wearable, the other kids wanted to just make stuff out of the trash. 

So I gave them some masking tape and that's what they did.

When I have a project for the kids, there are usually several of them who don't want to do it. This is fine, I don't make them do the projects. I strongly encourage it if it's something the gang is making for their parent(s), like an ornament or craft for a special occasion, but even then they still get to decide for themselves if it's a thing they want to do. They have so little autonomy. 

There are children who want to play with LEGO, build things with magnatiles, do independent art or color a picture instead. There's a lot of socializing, they have friends there and we all know they're discouraged from chit chat during the school day.

I caught up with our curriculum person later and told her that the amount of trash I brought in actually took me the better part of a year to save, and that it would have been really difficult to do the project if I'd relied on donated trash. I suggested a much longer planning period if we're going to be expected to offer that activity at all our sites. 

Since school's out, I'm back in saving mode. I have two bins that I've been tossing stuff into in our spare room. This week I've received a couple packages that were padded with what my grandma used to call popcorn.

You may call it packing peanuts or styrofoam.

Nope. 

It's fairy poop.

But it's not just plain old fairy poop! 
No, it's the variety that's been made with cornstarch. If you wet your fingertip and touch it, it melts a little and becomes sticky. You can create little sculptures with it, like the one below.

found on Pinterest

I do not tell my kids that it's biodegradable styrofoam, either. 
I let them know they're supposed to call it fairy poop.

Aren't you glad you stopped by today?