Recycling Projects: Box Cities

Box Cities

In this project, with some unwanted boxes, old newspapers, items from the junk drawer, and a little creativity, your child can construct entire cities and stay occupied for hours, maybe even days!

    What I like about this project is that it gives the kids (and young-spirited adults) a lot of room for creativity. No one’s box buildings and cities will turn out exactly the same!

Picture courtesy of: http://spoonful.com/crafts/box-buildings

Supplies needed:

-Small cardboard boxes (cereal, oatmeal, pasta, granola bar, ice cream carton, etc.)

-Newspaper

-Masking tape

-Decoupage (You can make your own by mixing equal parts of white glue and water)

-Tempera or acrylic paints

-Markers

-Toothpicks, popsicle sticks, cotton balls, dowels, film canisters, bottle caps, drawer knobs, buttons, scrap fabric, small stones, old game pieces, and other miscellaneous “junk” items. (Look around your house and yard for items that would add an interesting touch to your buildings).

Freewrite: Through the Train Window

Today, I’m traveling to the capitol of my state, Albany, by train. For all the long hours I’ve been on the train, the view out the window is rarely anything but dismal. It seems that the tracks typically run behind or in between industrial parks. The tracks weave their way from city to city: Buffalo, Rochester, Utica, Syracuse…
    All I see are the ugly decaying backs of abandoned factories, junkyards of cement hills and rusty construction vehicles, wires and caution tape, dead swamps with bare, twisted trees, muddy plains riddled with tire tracks, and the backyards of run-down houses full of discarded junk.
    When we go through the cities, the roads and bridges we pass by, under, and over are littered with trash. Carried by the wind, it seeps in to the surrounding stretches of sickly forests. The rivers and streams are a cruddy brown. We travel beneath massive highway bridges with legs large enough to be the trunks of redwood trees.
    I could go on, but everything else I have to describe is the same: dead, grey, brown, and depressing. I find myself wanting to stay on the train rather than step out into the repulsive world I see beyond my window. It seems as if I were to inhale a single breath of the air out there, I would die from the toxicity. 
    We did this. We cluttered our habitat with buildings and cars, many of which we abandoned in the slums and neglected outskirts of our cities where we thought no one would see them. But I see them now as my train weaves through the industrial parks and concrete jungles. I see a continuum of deserted items. All these inventions, once used and cherished, are now forsaken, like the plastic bags and napkins gathering at the edges of the forests like an invading army.
    As I see all of this, one word keeps persisting in my mind, over and over.
    Why?
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Thank you for reading my first freewrite post on Viridorari.