One Person's Trash...

Happy New Year! It has been quite a while since I posted. My last few attempts ended in disaster with my old laptop crashing twice and considerable time in between for repairs and finally replacement. I'm back for good now, I hope!

We have all heard the saying "One man's trash is another man's treasure!" When you are a preschool teacher, that saying is particularly true. I will take fabric scraps, plastic containers, previously used bulletin board decorations, or just about anything else you can imagine. Last week, in my director's office, I found several boxes of empty cardboard examination table paper rolls and a bag of rubber balls that someone probably ordered from Oriental Trading once and found that they didn't need. As it turned out, I had found a gold mine, a real treasure, an entire rainy week's worth of entertainment for a room full of busy boys and girls.

I brought in one box of the cardboard rolls and about a dozen rubber balls. I placed them in the center of the rug to see what they would do with them. Immediately, they started to try to build ball runs and see if they could get the balls to go through several tubes laid end to end. If they continued to quickly roll balls in, some would eventually be pushed out the other end. They were sort of losing interest by that time, so I suggested that they see what would happen if they used some blocks. Voila! Someone discovered that by raising the first tube up on a stack of blocks, the balls would roll faster and harder through the tubes. Sometimes the tubes would roll off the blocks or out of line. Someone else found that  you could make trays or railings for the tubes with more blocks. By then, they were hooked! For the entire week, we built new and different tracks and played with them nonstop. For this week, at least, the other toys were just props and filler to make the ball runs more interesting.

By the end of the week, some children got even more creative with the tubes or tired of building the runs. A few tried using them as weapons, but when threatened with losing the tubes entirely, found more "educational" ways of using them. One little boy put several balls into a tube, using sort of like a rainstick. A few others turned some of the tubes into instruments such as horns and drums and made some music for their classmates to dance to.  

As of Friday, they had not yet tired of these new "toys" so I will bring them out again this week and see what happens. When the newness wears off, I'll have to decide whether to find a place to store them until a later date or dispose of them altogether. My teacher/hoarder mentality thinks that would be a shame. For now, we will just enjoy this treasure.