Baby food alphabet boxes

As I've been preparing for the upcoming preschool year, I've been looking around my house with brand new eyes. Before I throw or give anything away, I'm asking myself, "Could I use this for some kind of craft or lesson?".

Having twins that are going through baby food at record pace, I was recycling tons of the plastic baby food containers. As I was getting ready to put a couple more in the recycle bin, I had an epiphany. I can use these for some alphabet lessons! This is what I came up with:

Remember those foam letters I got from Michael's a couple weeks back? I decided to use the containers to separate and hold the letters! I used some letter stickers from my scrapbooking stash to put on the outside of each box. I have come up with a few ways that I will be using these to teach Caleb his letters.

• I am planning on focusing on one letter per week, with some weeks in between where we will review the letters we have learned so far. Each week I will put out the box with the letter of the week we are focusing on and Caleb can play with the letters inside and do whatever he finds fun. He tends to be pretty creative, so it will be fun to see what he comes up with.
• I am planning on putting a lower case letter on the lid of each box, so on the weeks where we review our letters, I am thinking about trying out a matching game where he will match the lower case letter lid with the upper case letter box.
• If it seems he is ready for the concept of putting the letters in order, I may also use these for that purpose. I'm not going to push that unless he shows he is ready, though.

I'm sure as I go along I may think of other ways to use these...and so may Caleb!

So, start looking around your house. You never know what items you may be able to re-purpose!