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Justification and a Book Project

Something about those red cups at Starbucks…I seem to be unable to resist lately.

When I was preparing to recycle the cup from my last chai tea latte, or peppermint latte, or gingerbread latte, a new book making project popped into my head. For a way to reuse those corrugated cardboard sleeves, (and a way to justify way-too-many trips to Starbucks this month), read on…

Smooth and Bumpy Shape Books

This is a great book project for my (almost) three-year-old. He’s into both shapes and opposites right now, and loves all of the wonderful Sandra Boynton books, and other books that compare items.  (Big and small, short and tall…)

Here’s the plan:

  1. Enjoy your favorite warm drink.
  2. Save the sleeve.
  3. Cut the sleeve into shapes.  Depending on the age of your kids, they could do the cutting.  In our case, I punched them out or cut them freehand, and my son did the gluing. 
  4. Glue bumpy side up.
  5. Decorate the cover.  My son was over it by this time, so I just did that part.  You could also add words throughout the book. “Bumpy circle, smooth circle,” etc. 

This book would be great with just the bumpy shapes, or you could also add the smooth shapes like we did.  For the smooth shapes, we used the back of some boxes in our bin.  After this book was already finished, I thought that I might like the look of paper grocery bags better, since the color is exactly the same as the corrugated cardboard. This picky detail doesn’t matter to my son though.  Anything smooth works fine!

So that’s it! I think they’re a terrific use of corrugated cardboard, and a fun book project for the little ones, and we may have to make about ten more of them between now and Christmas. That last bit may be the caffeine talking.

Give them a try!  This could be modified a million ways. I’d love to see what you come up with!

P.S. Starbucks unfortunately did not sponsor this post. 🙂

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Hello!

Erin Wing is a mom of three and a reading intervention teacher. Here you'll find practical tips, evidence-based strategies, and fun ideas for growing capable readers and writers. More…

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