You might have already read our blog about fun drawing and painting tips for your kids. Now we can explore getting creative indoors with some family fun and helping our kids to use their imagination to make a variety of crafts to improve their skills. Seeing their artwork around the house that they have made will boost their self-esteem and make them proud of their masterpiece! Getting your child to sit down and concentrate on a particular activity will also decrease the likelihood of having a tantrum as they are more relaxed and focused.
Children generally love spending quality time with their parents making things they enjoy and those experiences will create memories for them that they will always cherish!
Bath Bomb Making Kit!
Who doesn’t love a good bath bomb? They are the perfect way to relax after a long day. Not only do they make your bath smell amazing, but they also make it look pretty too! With this Bath Bomb Making kit, you can make your own bath bombs at home with your kids. It’s a fun activity that will keep them entertained for hours on end – and you get to enjoy the fruits of their labour in the form of relaxing baths! Plus, it will teach them about the values of teamwork and collaboration as you work together to create something awesome!
Animal crafts activity for children using items from your house!
It’s great to get your kids learning about animals and nature from a young age and what better way to do this than through making things!? Teaching them about these topics throughout all the child development stages encourages nurturing and they also learn to be loving towards all creatures and animals, particularly if one day you decide to have pets in the house.
Plastic Cup Jellyfish
This is a fun yet simple way to create jellyfish and doesn’t need that many items to make it. All you need is a plastic cup, lots of paperclips and googly eyes, some string to hang it up and a small sharp tool such as a screwdriver or a small sharp knife. Children will definitely need some help to attach all the pieces together as you will need a sharp tool to poke holes in the cup so make sure if your child is under 12, then you have to do this part for them. In this tutorial, you can swap items for other items if you don’t have them. For example, if you don’t have paperclips, you can use strings for the tentacles instead or thinly cut pieces of tissue paper or card or pipe cleaners, whatever you want! Also if you don’t have plastic cups, you can use plastic bowls instead.
Bunny Sock Puppet
It’s always useful to look for things around the house that you don’t need anymore, that you could possibly transform into something fun! Sock puppets are one of the best ways to reuse old items and you can make a bunch of different animals with them such as a rabbit, dog, cat, mouse etc. Here’s a set of basic instructions on how to make a sock puppet:
- Find a sock that will fit over your child’s hand. While it’s on their hand, you can help them to make a mark for where the eyes, nose and mouth will be (as they make the gesture of an animal’s face with their hand). You can do this using a marker or a pen.
- You can now take the sock off and lay it flat on the table to make it easier to decorate.
- Glue on some eyes for the puppet- you can use pompoms, googly eyes, buttons or anything that can make a pair of eyes. The best glue to use is a glue gun since it dries quickly and keeps everything very secure- of course you have to make sure your child isn’t near the glue gun!
- Glue on a pink pompom or cut out some pink felt for the bunny’s nose and use some small cut up pieces of cotton wool or string for the whiskers. If your child is over age 8, they can probably cut the pieces themselves but still supervise them.
- After the pieces are dry, make your child wear the puppet again and they can make a mark for where the bunny ears can go.
- Take the puppet off again, cut up some ears made from felt and stick on the marked spot. There you have your simple bunny sock puppet! Watch your toddler or young child play ground with the puppet and see the excitement on their face!
DIY nature activity for kids
As mentioned before, letting your kids immerse themselves within nature is one of the best ways to get creative so one way they can do this is by sending them on an adventure in the garden (or if you have a front garden) and letting them walk around picking different items they find on the floor. This is so that once they have collected nature-related things, they can bring them inside the house and stick them on some coloured card with glue, creating a specific shape of a creature. This activity is perfect for children of any age as they all love to go outside in the fresh air and explore by themselves.
One idea we suggest is to create a collage of bugs and insects made from leaves and twigs. For instance, to create a butterfly, your child can find a twig for the body and different sized leaves for the wings. There are many different insects they can create in this very simple way. Use PVA glue to stick everything on the card and let it dry overnight. Once dried, you can put their beautiful artwork into a frame and hang it up on their wall.
Awesome Art and crafts ideas using card/paper
Make Your Own Box!
All you need to do is download this file of 3 pages and print on white pieces of card. There are 3 versions, 2 already designed templates of a box for girls and boys and 1 plain template so your kids can use their imagination to draw and design their own box! They can also use our adorable crayons to colour in!
Printables
We’ve got a whole load of fun activities for kids to get creative and learn about the world. You can find drawing, writing, counting and colouring in printables as well as other awesome resources on our website.
Milk Carton House
As mentioned before already, one way to do parenting right is to show your kids how to use items you want to throw away in the bin and transform it into something cool that they can always play with. Be the best role model you can be for them as they are growing up.
You might have milk cartons or cartons of any drink like juice etc. around the house that you are thinking about throwing away or recycling but we have a great idea for you and your child! You’re probably thinking how am I supposed to make anything from a drink carton!? Well, it’s much easier than you imagine and this activity only needs a few things- a carton (or a few depending on how many you want to make), sheets of plain or coloured card, PVA glue (or a glue stick if you don’t have PVA). Here’s how to make it:
- Cover the carton with the sheets of card by sticking them all over with the glue. You may need to bend or cut some of the pieces of card to fully cover the carton, especially at the top which is not a flat surface. The top will be the roof of the house so you can choose a different colour to make it stand out from the rest of the house. Your child can do all the sticking if they are over age 5.
Note- if you don’t have sheets of card, you can use newspaper.
- Don’t we all just love getting messy with paint, especially kids!? Well your child can experiment painting all over the house, however they like. Of course, if they are very young, their motor skills growth is not at the stage where their hands are steady so it won’t be neat but it doesn’t matter, let them go wild!
- Help your child to cut out a little flap for the door to open and close with a knife or a scalpel.
- The final step! Ask your child what a house looks like- it can be a little bit like a guessing game, testing them on the relevant words. Then when they say the words, tell them to draw those words onto the house: windows, doors, chimney, bricks and anything else. The outcome should look something like this:
Depending on your child’s age and sense of creativity, the end result can be more complicated, like actually cutting out all the windows and chimney etc, but anyway it’s up to them how they want to do it! This is the perfect rainy day activity to do indoors and in the summer holidays, you can get together with your friends’ children and have play dates where they can use their other toys and dolls and use the house as a ‘dolls’ house.
Toilet Tube Animals
Imagine how many toilet paper rolls you finish in a month! If you were to keep all of them instead of throwing them away, think about how many cool things you and your child could create out of them such as Toilet Tube animals! One of our colleagues did this great activity with her class of kids aged 5-8 and they went crazy- they really loved it so you can try this out with your kids!
Colourful Picture Collage
This is the perfect child activity that is really ‘hands-on’ and basically involves your child ripping pieces of coloured paper or card to create a collage of a picture. It’s easy-peasy!
The first step is to draw a large outline of an object you want, like a landscape (for instance a beach- it will require more card and would make the result beautiful). Your child can draw it themselves if they can/want to. They can also draw a castle, perfect for girls or a dragon, perfect for boys. Then all you do is rip up very small pieces of coloured paper to fill in the picture you drew. So, if your child decides to draw a dragon, they can rip up pieces of different shades of green for different parts of the dragon’s body. Then, they can use red and orange colour for fire coming out of it’s mouth. Use a solid glue stick to stick all the pieces.
Yes, your house might get a little messy and tidy and you’ll probably find bits of cut up paper all over the floor but try top just mostly watch and supervise your child and help them if they need it- leave the cleaning to the end. This video of a collage of a fox is just an idea to get you started but feel free to inspire your child to make the collage as advanced and complicated as they like to, especially if they are older and more capable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEK9_EzKlXQ
To wind down after a hectic day of fun arts and crafts, you and your kids can sit down and write in your Mindful Dreams notebooks, writing about what activities you enjoyed most, your feelings and what you are grateful for.
Get started on some of these ideas and see for yourself how much fun your child can have with such a little small amount of materials!