How-to: Build Newspaper Structures with Your Kids–It’s a Toy that You Can Recycle!

Cold and wet and dismal outside?

There’s nothing like staying inside, doing some math enrichment with the kids!

Newspaper, rolled tightly and taped, makes an excellent, large-format building toy. It’s also great for three more reasons:

1. Upcycled newspaper=a free craft supply.
2. Newspaper crafts=more value from your newspaper subscription.
3. Recycled newspaper, post-play=a clean house.

Here’s how to turn yesterday’s newspaper into a temporary toy that your kids will love using to increase their spatial reasoning abilities.

To make your toy, place two full sheets of newspaper on top of each other, roll them very tightly from one corner to the opposite corner, and secure with a small piece of masking tape.

That’s it!

To make the best tight roll, use something to start you off. I’m using a thin marker and then pulling it out of the tube each time, but if you have something like paper straws, which can go into the recycling, too, then you wouldn’t have to remove them from the finished tubes, and your newspaper tubes would be all the tighter and sturdier for them.

My kiddos “helped” with the creation of the newspaper tubes, but neither of them had the ability to roll the newspaper tightly enough, so as soon as we had a half-dozen or so tubes done, I encouraged them to start building, and then assigned myself to the job of making newspaper tubes as fast as they could use them.

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