02 July 2007

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.  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.

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Your comments

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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).

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.

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.

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