No matter how much you try to recycle or buy products with less packaging, there are going to be moments when you'll wind up with a few extra plastic, glass or styrofoam containers laying about. Perhaps they have an interesting size or are made up of a difficult to recycle material.
A small cabinet above our kitchen sink at home has been filling up with a variety of these containers for several months now. Though I've attempted to organize the lids separately and nest the small ones inside the larger ones, there are only so many things to be done with old yogurt containers. When I found myself contemplating how to to contain my containers, I knew that it was time to get creative.
Over these same several months, my two kids have amassed a size-able collection of artifacts from their time spent outdoors. They have seeds, seed pods, shells, rocks of varying types, fossil casts, bark, sticks, feather and more. Until now, we'd always kept these items stuffed in a small basket, which never really did them justice and just served to keep them from being examined more closely once brought home. Recently after I realized I needed a better solution to my storage problem, we spent some time making our own "museum" and the kids cataloged the items and sorted them.
We used those unwanted plastic jars and boxes, glass jars, cans and trays and turned them into repositories for the artifacts. My eldest son then labeled them and lined them up on our windowsill for display. There they sit for examination anytime and they are neatly arranged and add a sort of decorative effect to our bare white windows.
Your own museum need not be only a nature museum, it could have any theme, or consist of a collection of toys, or other "precious artifacts" deemed most suitable by their young owner. Your ideas are only limited to the number of containers you can collect.
-Christine
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