Things you can do with old coffee tins

My sister enjoys General Foods International coffee that come in those cute little red and white tins. She started saving them for me because I hoped to recycle them into cute little candy / token holders or some other crafty keepsake. For Cate's first communion, I did manage to bust out nine of them to use as vases, but since then, I have kept accumulating but not crafting.

Last night I found another purpose for six more of those cute little tins.

We have been working with the kids on managing chore charts. They receive allowance for all the smiley stickers they put on their worksheets. Some 'chores' are easy: brush teeth (duh- have to do that daily!) and others are a little more stinky such as collect garbage or take garbage out. When they hit their daily chores (make bed, brush teeth twice) and hit more than half of their other chores --we live a busy life and don't have consistency from night-to-night--they will get paid out their weekly allowance.

At a family meeting (yes, we have those!) the kids were open to go with the spend, save, share method. There are some pretty awesome kits out there to purchase, but that seemed a bit frivolous given the basis of this approach. We can give the kids an active experience by making our own banks. That's where coffee tins, some scrapbook paper, glue, ribbon and sharpie came in.

It took all of 15 minutes to complete including kids choosing their own paper and ribbon. Now they are proud to see their little quarters already adding up.

It will be fun to continue the conversations as the tins get fuller and see what ideas they can come up with to share their treasure. I'm sure they will come up with some great ideas. I'll keep you posted.