Turn Old Baby Food Pouch Lids Into A Fun Educational Toy For Your Kids

If you have an older baby or a toddler at home, chances are, you go through a lot of baby food pouches. These are super handy, but not so easy to recycle once your baby is done. You can send your baby's finished plastic caps to TerraCycle through its GoGo squeeZ Free Recycling Program, but that can be a bit time-consuming. That's why we prefer an easier (and much more fun!) way to recycle (or in this case, upcycle) these lids — by turning them into an educational toy for your little one!

An Instagrammer shared a cool craft project that transformed their old pouch lids into a game. They painted colorful circles on a piece of cardboard and cut holes to place the old tops, allowing kids to screw the lids on and off. This created a pattern-matching game for toddlers. "A fun, hands-on way to build fine motor skills, color recognition, and early math thinking — while giving those lids a second life!" they wrote in the caption.

To make this activity your own, based on your child's interests or ages, you could write numbers or letters on the lids and have kids match them with details in the patterns. Or cut holes in the cardboard in a line, encouraging kids to correctly line up the numbers from one to 10, or the entire alphabet in order.

Creative moms can have fun coming up with new, brilliant ways to turn baby food trash into treasure. For a twist on the pattern recognition game (which may be too difficult for younger children), draw a cute animal, like a butterfly or a caterpillar, on a piece of cardboard. Have your child choose the order they want to screw on the lids to complete the picture.

Outside of the screw-top game, you can also use the old pouch lids as part of your craft projects. For example, these make for great wheels for toilet paper roll cars, tied together to create the body of a yarn caterpillar, or small ladybug finger puppets, along with the help of some pipe cleaners and black paint. Or you use lids to help make art by having toddlers dip the lids in paint and create a cool circular pattern on construction paper.

Don't have the energy for any of that? Keep it simple by adding a bunch of lids to a box or plastic tub to create an easy sensory tub for your toddlers. Throw in some empty paper towel rolls as tunnels, or have them sort the lids into different piles by color. These plastic lids can create hours of fun that your toddler would miss if you immediately threw them away, so take advantage of them.