Trash Animals - The Game

On car rides where my 6 year old daughter E doesn’t feel like listening to music, we end up talking about random things. Car rides are great because I get focused time as a parent where the kids aren’t squirming around and distracted by a bunch of things. They are strapped in tight and situated in their seat.

We started to play this trash animal game where one person would name an animal and the other person would describe how they would make the animal…out of trash. This game really came about because E loves art and also wants to reuse things to save the Earth. She learned about global warming and how consumption is using a lot of the energy and resources we have while also creating waste. It was a lot of different conversations and weeks of digesting kids books for her, but now she is more conscious of what we all need to try and do - consume less.

Back to the game itself, we would name something like an elephant and say that we would make the body out of an old couch cushion, the legs out of wooden chair legs, the tail out of a plastic bottle cut into a strand, the ears out of an old blanket, and the trunk out of an old fire hose. We would picture that funny looking animal made out of trash and see how creative we could get with making different parts of the animal. My wife recently heard us playing it and asked whether we played it before since she hasn’t heard us doing that before and we said yes! It’s a fun thought exercise and a way to keep the creative muscles moving in your brain. It also helps pass the time quickly also!