We love crafting with all families at Eureka. We especially love running recycling SCRAPtastic workshops with 3 generations of crafters all at once, which is one of the many reasons we love being at Eureka! Children’s Museum in Halifax. During half term we were invited to run our SCRAPtastic workshops for families and worked with over 3000 people making monsters, masks, puppets and more. It’s a brilliant space for families, and all ages joined our workshops with one Grandad delightedly telling us “This is the best fun I’ve had since junior school!” whilst making a monster mask with his daughter and grandson!
Our SCRAPtastic workshops only ever use materials that would otherwise be thrown away. We like to encourage conversations around waste and what we do with our rubbish. Prompted by the recycling facts we place around the room; people are talking about ways to take little steps to change the world as they craft. Discussions between parents and children arise about using plastic bottles, ordering too much online and why recycling paper is so important. We don’t pretend to know all the answers, but we do know that little steps of behaviour change make a big difference, and we hope our workshops inspire that.
“Recycling stuff is good because it is good for the environment………. Very encouraging for all abilities to create something…….Kids loved this, really enjoyed it……..Great idea, will try at home………Fun for our kids from our 4 to our 13 year old……… I love recycling and we love junk modelling, so this was a top class activity for our family!” feedback from families.
Don’t throw it away, make something! In SCRAPtastic at Eureka! families made 403 pen pot pals from toilet roll tubes, to highlight that one family throws away 6 trees worth of paper and card every year. 136 monster masks and 169 hedgehogs were created to draw attention to the fact that 60% of rubbish that goes in the bin could be recycled. Halloween always creates a lot of waste so making your own decorations is the perfect SCRAPtastic alternative. We made 348 Halloween owl and bat mobile decorations and 300 egg box wreaths because the amount of wastepaper buried each year would fill 103,488 buses! Even without Halloween each year enough plastic is thrown away to circle the earth FOUR times, so we upcycled 403 yoghurt pots into monsters, aliens, ghouls, ghosts, and pumpkins.
These facts are scarier than all the ghouls and goblins that were created during SCRAPtastic at Eureka! Children’s Museum. Thank you to all the families who joined us to take their own little steps to change the world by re-using, re-thinking and re-purposing household waste. And a huge thank you to Eureka! for inviting us to join their half term activities and making us feel so welcome and part of the brilliant Eureka! team.
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