The Junk Box: A Collection of Odds and Ends for Inspiring Creativity

Many, many years ago, when I was in college, I read an interview with Trey Anastasio (perhaps in Rolling Stone?  I don't remember anymore) in which he talked about how his mother, a writer for Sesame Street Magazine, really encouraged creativity.  He mentioned that she would give him and his sister a random assortment of things and tell them to make something out of them.  I distinctly remember thinking to myself "What a great idea; I will do this when I have kids."

Fast forward to what seems to be many lifetimes later, I have kids, and we keep what we refer to as "the junk box."  It's no longer even a box--we transferred it from a box to a large reusable shopping bag--but the name stuck.  The junk box is filled with anything you can imagine, and more.  I have been filling the junk box for about four years now (yes...it actually moved with us from California, as nuts as that may seem.)  Whenever we have some kind of smallish item that can't be recycled and/or looks interesting, we add it to the junk box. 

We do different things with the contents.  I have, like Anastasio's mother, pulled out a few random things and left them for the kids to explore and use.  Sometimes we keep something for which we have a specific plan.  And other times, we just take out the junk box and see what we can make.

A few weeks ago, we made gardens:

These were created based on some of-the-moment inspiration: we took out some of the junk, someone realized that something looked like a flower, and suddenly we were each making our own garden. In Teacher Tom style, we assembled them using a glue gun. So far I'm the only one operating said device--which is, incidentally, a dollar store-quality glue gun I got at a garage sale when I was about twenty and which is, amazingly, still going strong after all these years.

These gardens contain a really random assortment of materials, including:

*Disposable carry-out chopsticks

*Disk-shaped small plastic building toys

*Foam containers that previously held sticker sets

*Fruit/vegetable mesh

*Green vinyl from knitting needle packaging

*An old lid from a Sigg water bottle

*(unused!) Foam earplugs

*Wire from an old dollar store tiara

*Handles from mesh baby feeders

*Various kinds of styrofoam

*The lid for a food storage container we no longer have

And this is precisely why I think you should have a junk box, too.  When else would you ever think to put all of those things together?  You wouldn't.  You wouldn't put them together unless you happened to have them sitting around.  And you might make a flower garden out of clay, or paper mache, or some other such traditional art material, and those would all be great.  But forcing ourselves to look at the form of an object outside of its function and think about how else it might be used is a great intellectual exercise, and one worth encouraging in our children.

There are literally hundreds of items in our junk box, and we add more all the time.  You'd be amazed at how many little odds and ends you dispose of on a daily or weekly basis, all of which could have a second or third life as materials for art and exploration.