New Explorations with Waste Materials in Early Childhood Education.

Creativity is innately brought with secret power which can emerge at any time throughout life and be enhanced if fostered. Properly designed art activities serve as a potential for emergence and the enhancement of children’s creativities in their early childhood educations. Those children who cannot express their emotions through oral language or other activities are provided with such an opportunity to express themselves and reflect their thoughts, emotions and views on daily experiences. Art experiences foster creative thinking by stimulating imagination. There are a great variety of techniques to be used in art activities, and a lot of various materials and equipments are available. One of the options for material selection is that of waste materials which help children attain new experiences and ideas. Waste materials include boxes, plastic bottles, pieces of cloth, rolls of paper towels, reels, beads, nutshells, tree shells and leaves with different shapes and sizes. Another advantage of using waste materials is that children learn how to recycle these materials while they gain a sense of texture, shape, weight, wideness and space. Furthermore, this kind of an activity fosters creative thinking and enhances visual and tactual perceptions while the children create unique things. In this study, the status and the importance of the use of waste materials in art activities mentioned in early childhood programs including the points to be born in mind while preparing and using such materials will be discussed and eventually sample products made with waste materials by the children will be presented.