Recycled Bird Feeder & Two Ingredient Play Dough

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This is a 2-in-one post! Make a simple two-ingredient play dough then use the bottle to make a recycled bird feeder!

With Earth Day this week, there has been a lot more focus on recycling and earth-friendly projects. I think it is great that we focus on it at this time of year, but it is so important to do all year long!  There are so many ways to recycle and reuse in everyday living!

I have two ways to recycle products that you may already have in your house in this post!  Today I want to show you how to make a recycled bottle bird feeder from a baby lotion bottle!  Plus, I have a simple 2-ingredient baby lotion play dough recipe that is my kids new favorite!

Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc. is focusing on recycling this year with their Care To Recycle® program. I am excited to be a part of it and share some details of their program and some recycling tips. The aim of the program is to help raise awareness of the need to extend recycling habits to bathroom products. These containers often get forgotten!

Baby lotion seems to be something I always end up with more than I actually use!  I just love the smell of it so much that I overbuy, I think. I have several bottles of it in my cupboard from my last baby that were reaching the expiration date. I decided it was time to do something fun with them since I do not even have babies anymore!

So, I experimented a bit and made an easy two ingredient play-dough with my kids! Just mix together lotion and cornstarch and you get a silky smooth delicious smelling play dough!

How to Make the Two Ingredient Play Dough:

This is seriously the easiest to make. The proportions, I think were pretty close to double the cornstarch to lotion. So if you use 1/4 c. of lotion, you would use about 1/2 c. of cornstarch. I love the scent of the vanilla oatmeal baby lotion.

Mix it well and it will get really smooth. If it is too sticky add a touch more cornstarch and if it is too dry add little more lotion.  Add food coloring if you want.

We loved this play dough because it smelled heavenly and it made our hands soft when we played with it! Plus, it only took 5 minutes to make.

Next we took our empty lotion bottle and turned it into a recycled bottle bird feeder!  This was so much fun for the kids! They loved that we were making it out of a plastic bottle.

How to Make a Recycled Bottle Bird Feeder:

To make the bird feeder, you need to peel off the plastic labels from the bottle. Clean out the bottle and make sure all of the lotion is gone. Pull out the pump and take it apart. Clean out the pump as well. You don’t want the birds getting any lotion in their food!

Then we cut out an oval from one side of the bottle to make the feeding place for the birds. Under the oval, make an X cut for the perch to fit into.

We used the lotion pump top attached to the tube part for the perch of the bird feeder.  I put in a little bit of super glue to make sure it stayed secure. Trim the tube down to an appropriate size and put it through the X cut.

Attach a string to the top to hang it. I kept the top on to keep water out when it rains.

Then fill it with bird seed and hang it in a tree!

Recycling can be fun to teach your kids and shouldn’t be viewed as a chore!  Do fun activities to re-use household products. Help kids to understand the importance of reusing and recycling things.  A 2016 consumer survey on in-home recycling habits, conducted in partnership with Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc., showed that 60% of parents would be more likely to discuss recycling with their children if it was an activity they could do together and they had more creative, engaging ways to explain the impact of recycling.

Try some other sensory play activities:

How to Make Oobleck: Science with Dr. Seuss!

How to Make Cloud Dough

How to Make Kinetic Sand