How To Make Handmade Paper From Recycled Scraps With Kids - DIY Tutorial

Here is an easy tutorial on how to make handmade paper at home with your kids using recycled paper scraps. I did this Waldorf inspired activity with my 3 year old son after we visited handmade paper factory as a part of our homeschool co-op field trip last week. Making paper is magical, therapeutic & its super simple too!

We had visited hand made paper factory recently and since summers are here in India, I thought it is a great time to make hand made paper at home with my 3 year old son. I had been meaning to do this for a long time & for this project, I had also collected old paper bills, scrap papers, left over paper cutouts while making Montessori inspired printable activities etc. They all came in handy while making this handmade paper. And not to mention, my boy was super excited to replicate at home what we had seen in the handmade paper factory recently.

WHAT YOU NEED

• Recycled wastepaper (I used old paper bills, scrap papers, paper cut outs from craft sessions, my son's old scribbled papers)
• Blender / mixer
• Big large utensils
• Water
• Wide kitchen sieve 
• Rag clothes
• Towel
• Flower petals, food colors, thread cuttings (optional)
• SUN (lol)

PROCESS

Me & my son tore the scrap papers into small pieces & put them into warm water & left them to soak for 30 minutes while we had our lunch. You see these big utensils that contain soaked papers.

Then I blended the soaked papers and formed a nice pulp out of it.

His friends also joined in & then the kids took the pulp & placed it into the circular kitchen sieve that I had. I use that sieve for flour to make chapatis. They put one layer of pulp on to the sieve & pressed it to make it uniform - neither too thick nor too thin. Putting a container beneath the sieve works well to contain all the draining water. 

Now the task is to keep squeezing out water from this sieve. Before that we put in some flower petals on the the pulp to make it beautiful. See those orange petals in the pic? This step is optional. And you can also put in seeds in the paper at this step so that when this paper is discarded & thrown in the soil, something grows out of it. We also put in some thread cuttings into the paper to give it another look.

We used a rag cloth to press the sieve so that more & more water squeezes out of the pulp & the grains/fibres of the paper inside the pulp start to attach to each other & take a form of paper all set together.

My son again pressed the pulp in the sieve kept on old newspaper so that it absorbs water from both the sides.

Finally when we felt that the water is squeezed out pretty nicely from the pulp & the paper which is in the making is binding nicely (basically the fibres), I inverted the sieve & the wet paper landed up on the towel like this. It was an awesome moment to put down our first paper on the towel with no cracks at all. 

And slowly we had a bunch of papers ready to be sun dried! We ended up putting food colors in some papers, that is the reason you see greenish paper in the picture below.

And the next day, our handmade papers were all ready!!! They looked gorgeous to us!!! Don't they?

Handmade papers also make beautiful gifts & keepsakes! 

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What Is Lunar & Solar Eclipse - DIY Model & Activity - Astronomy For Kids

With the recent rare phenomenon of Super Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse, kids have been pretty amazed with the eclipse phenomenon. This is a perfect opportunity to make a hands-on model & activity showing how exactly the solar & lunar eclipse occur. This DIY solar system model is super simple & you can make use of things at home to make it. This is a perfect Astronomy starter for kids.

Solar system models are a great way to demonstrate how an eclipse works, and can be constructed with varying complexity for all ages. By setting up the sun, moon and Earth, parents and teachers can demonstrate the phases of the moon as well as an eclipse.


Things Required

• Sphere 1 - Sponge ball or yellow smiley ball or an orange
• Sphere 2 ( smaller than sphere 1) - Ping pong ball or lemon or small thermacol ball
• Wire that can be bent easily but is stable enough. I used pipe cleaner
• Aluminium foil
• Red gelatine paper
• Stack of books or an elevated platform
• Something to put the sponge ball on, I used a diya lying around at home
• Torch

How to Setup

• Sphere 1 represents the earth & sphere 2 represents the moon. I used a sponge globe for sphere 1 and a small thermacol ball for sphere 2.
• Wrap aluminium foil over sphere 2 so that it reflects light falling on it in a better way. Moon reflects the light falling on it. This step is optional though.
• Pierce a little hole & insert the wire (I used pipe cleaner) into the earth, bend it at right angle, then again bend it at right angle & then insert it into the moon. Align the wire such that earth & moon are in front of each other with their equators aligned horizontally. Refer the picture for clarity.
• Place the earth on a stand, I used a diya
• Take a stack of books or an elevated platform (I used a small stool) & put a torch on it. Torch represents the sun. Adjust the height of the book stack such that the torch light falls at the equator of the earth.
• Switch off the lights of the room & switch on the torch.

• With this setup, you can explain first how the earth goes round the sun by moving the earth manually. 
• You can also explain rotation of earth & tell how days & nights happen when sunlight falls on a specific part of the earth. 
• Now by taking the moon round the earth, you can how how differently the moon shines at different alignments because of the angle at which sunlight is falling on it. You can explain moon phases with this setup. 
• Now to explain lunar eclipse, you can align sun, earth & moon in a line respectively. Of course you have to revise your own concepts first before you start explaining verbally about this setup, kids have deep strange questions!

• In a similar way, you can explain the solar eclipse as well.
• To show the blood moon in some sense, you can take red gelatine paper and put it in front of the torch. However this is not the real explanation of blood moon. It occurs because earth’s atmosphere absorbs all the colours in the spectrum instead of red & hence very little percentage of sun’s rays (in red spectrum) reach the moon during eclipse & it appears to be red.

Hope you liked this simple to set up activity to explain earth’s rotation & revolution, moon’s revolution, moon’s phases, lunar & solar eclipses.

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Do not forget to follow "The K Junction" on Facebook page & closed Facebook group, Twitter and Instagram for day to day updates that might not always find a place on this blog. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to know more about our early learning journey, DIY & Montessori & Waldorf inspired activities for kids, kids books & toys reviews and much more!

Hope to see you around. Happy Parenting!

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