Telephone books as scribble material

Irene's found a great use for all those unused copies of the Yellow Pages:

I'm always amazed at the number of phone books that get delivered to my door.  I have a nice place in my kitchen to store them but we're pretty Internet-based in this family, so I NEVER use them.  If I need to find information I do it on the Web.  My children love to scribble in books and most of the time, they ask to scribble in books that they can't or shouldn't.  Now I let them do whatever they want to do in these phone books!  They draw with pens, pencils, markers; they turn the pages and yell "look Mom a pizza" and then pretend to prepare an order.  They are only 5 and 3 years old so they can't read or write yet.  But these books, on days when their brains are screaming "scribble in something" allow them long moments of joy.  I have 7 of these phone books of different colors and sizes.  I used to think I should just throw them out.  But now they are the best coloring books in the house.

This is great! For the longest time, my daughter loved coloring the newspaper. I found that she enjoyed tracing the headlines -- great pre-writing practice for her.

Comments

[Randa @ FreeStuff4Kids]

My son loves to scribble in telephone books and he's only 2- definitely a great use for those since no one uses them anymore.

[Jennifer]

Thanks for this hack. We drown in phone books in my house. Don't forget you can recycle them once they've been scribbled to death.

[Karin]

Along the same lines (i.e. free entertainment), I pick up the free autotrader-type magazines that you can find at the grocery store, etc. and let my car-obsessed almost 3-year-old son color in those. He likes them better than coloring books.

[julia]

You can also let your kids practice their cutting skills on the yellow pages.

[angie]

i love this idea - and why is it that there are so many phone books?!

[Elana]

I use 'em for cutting and for gluing. One the page gets gunky, rip it out and nice new surface!

[Richelle F]

My son used to love to "read" the phone books (i.e. flip through and tear out the pages) when he was 6-12 months old. He hasn't really played with them lately. I'll have to let him color in them. He really likes coloring now (he is 16m).

[Marc]

Along these lines I bring home stacks of discarded reports from work for my sone to color on. It's amazing the volumes of paper that is simply disgarded in an office.

[Marc]

Along these lines I bring home stacks of discarded reports from work for my son to color on. It's amazing the volumes of paper that is simply disgarded in an office.