Recycling Bread Bags

If you are like our family, we go through quite a few loaves of bread. While we love homemade bread, for sandwiches, I admit, the store-bought loaves are nicely uniform in slice and so I buy sandwich bread.

When you think of recycling the plastic bags that a loaf of bread comes in, you probably think of things like using those bags to bag up other things...used them for wet diapers when my kids were babies and we used clothe diapers, good for putting wet swimsuits in to carry back home after an afternoon at the lake, good to put your extra garden produce in to give to a neighbor, etc.

Here's another, radically different way to use those plastic bread sacks. Not a new idea because I remember doing this as a kid, but I haven't seen or heard anyone talking about it in a long time, either. Making refrigerator art out of them.

To help Kenna with her motor skills, we try to have her using scissors fairly often. Now, to use bread bags for this exercise, you must have Bunny Bread wrappers. I'm not necessarily saying Bunny Bread is the best bread out there, and yes I know those loaves are a little more expensive. Bear with me.

Bunny Bread comes with all these pictures of the Bunny Bread rabbit all over them. Today, Kenna and Maddy sat and cut all those pictures of the rabbit out of the wrapper (I cut in it in two and let each of them have half). They thought it was neat to get to cut up a bread wrapper (I didn't tell them what we were going to do with it) and Kenna got in extra motor skill exercise with her scissors.

Once the rabbit designs were cut out, I wiped down the front of my refrigerator with a damp rag. The girls then took those plastic rabbits and stuck them to the fridge, and using the damp rag, carefully rubbed over their cut-out to smooth out the wrinkles. That plastic clings to the refrigerator just like stickers. And will stay until removed (will easily remove).

So, in a matter of a few minutes, the girls got to cut out rabbits, got to stick them to the refrigerator, and will enjoy their work for a few days. Simple. Inexpensive. Fun.

Oh, and there's a science lesson there that process, too. Explore the "why" of what makes the plastic cling so well to the fridge.

Here's a look at their art display: