Save opaque plastic lids of the same kind (peanut butter jar lids are good) and make games for young kids. Hide small treats like marshmallows or small crackers under a few of the lids and lay 10-20 of them upside-down on the table altogether. Have the kids take turns seeing if they can choose a lid with a treat (which they then get to eat). They also like to be the ones to do the hiding and let other children guess which ones have the treats.
You can also make this a matching game. Hide two of some kind of treat under two lids, two of another under two others, etc. until each treat is under two different lids. Have the children pick two lids at a time, check to see which treat is under each, and if a match turns up, they get to eat the treats.
Lids can be stacked to build towers etc. or be used for large tic-tac-toe markers. They can be placed top down to form cups for a marble tossing game with points for hitting certain lids. Older kids can exercise their imaginations by making up their own games using lids.
By Judy from ND
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All good ideas that children love, with possibilities for so many more! When my children were young they really enjoyed simple games like these that let us use our imagination. Games that involve tossing are always fun and build eye-hand coordination as well. We often played penny toss (into various sized containers) but it would be simple enough to use lids instead--big lids for small children or small caps for larger children, using different colors to keep track of how each person was doing.
Stacking games were also fun and easy to devise with simple objects at hand. My children are grown now and I miss those days of imaginative play with them. This post brought back a flood of good memories. It is also a welcome reminder that the creating fun activities needn't require that money be spent. Games like these provide thrifty fun indeed!
I like saving the laundry cup lids of different sizes so that I and my kids can play with them, and they are all repurposable to other things after they get tired of them if they do. Of course I wash them really well, they are fun sand toys and water toys, and they are fun just to have around, they are kind of like those stacking cups that they have in the baby isle at Walmart.
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