You can recycle plastic marked with the recycling symbol #6 into a great craft material. Cut a flat piece of the plastic and place it over a picture. Trace the picture and color it in with permanent markers. Cut around the picture leaving 1/4 inch extra on all sides. Place the plastic on a cookie sheet and place in a 350-degree oven for three and a half minutes. The plastic will shrink and harden. To make a pendant, use a hole punch on the plastic before baking it. This project is a good fit for teaching about the scientific properties of heat.
Have your kids go on a musical scavenger hunt, finding anything that might otherwise be thrown away that they think they can make music with. Old paint buckets make excellent drums, for instance. Rubber bands stretched over empty tissue boxes become a makeshift banjo. Beans or rice inside an oatmeal box or baby food jar become maracas. This is a great project for using imagination as well as recyclables. It's also a good opportunity to teach the science of sound.
Collect discarded cardboard boxes and tubes and paper cups and plates, and give them to your kids with instructions to use them to come up with a game. They might make a marble run out of the tubes or a cup-and-stick game with a tube and a paper cup. Another idea is to describe a game or toy to them, and then ask them to come up with their best interpretation. This activity is not only artistic, it teaches children about invention.
Have your kids tear recycled newspaper into small squares and put it all into a bucket, and then cover it in water. After the paper has been soaking for 24 hours, instruct them to use a large wire whisk to break up any large pieces that remain. This is paper pulp. Pour the pulp into a big plastic bin and add more water until the bin is half full. Staple a piece of screening to a wood frame, dip the frame into the water, collecting some pulp and allowing the water to drain out as much as possible. Turn the wet homemade paper out and press with a rolling pin between two towels before allowing to dry. This activity teaches about the properties of paper.