Recycled items are a great material for children to work with because they encourage imagination and design thinking. They are also a sustainable way to create, and it teaches children that not every item needs to be disposed after a single use.

When children work with items that they have seen originally serve a different purpose, they have to learn to see this object in a new way. They engage in creative inquiry, as they work with these open-ended materials, finding new ways to manipulate them, change them, and build them into something from their own imaginations.