I was really excited when I heard that the picnic table talk topic for this week was arts and crafts. As the title of my blog implies, I love crafting with and for my children. I wrote about things I do to encourage creativity in our home here (there are more excellent ideas in the comments for that post). That post inspired this post about crafting in tight and/or rented spaces (there are some great suggestions in the comments for this post also). Crafting can get pretty messy, so I shared my best laundry tips and tricks here.
Here are a couple favorite activities I made up with my kids:
- Using a plastic desk protector and a roll of paper to make various play mats – so far we’ve done a Play-doh play mat, a restaurant play mat, and a house plan play mat.
- Geometric shapes felt board activities.
Emma has recently started inventing her own craft activities, which is very fun and rewarding to see.
I’m always a fan of free-style art, and let’s not forget nature’s art. I try to let my kids play outdoors as much as possible, weather permitting, and I’ve even been known to bring the outdoors in on particularly blistery days.
I love art supplies. Here are the basics that I try to always have on hand:
- Felt
- Markers (I love Crayola washable)
- Crayons
- Construction paper
- Glue sticks
- Plain paper
- Roll paper (we get ours from Ikea, which has the best price I’ve seen)
Other items I like to have around:
- pom poms
- pipe cleaners
- beads (with holes large enough to fit on the pipe cleaners)
- yarn
- fabric scraps
- various kitchen and household recyclables
- Play-doh (store-bought or home made play dough)
- any other art supplies I can get my hands on
I also recently bought some Crayola paint-filled brushes that I love (and blogged about here). I’m pretty loyal towards Crayola products, in no small part because I ingested ridiculous quantities of their art supplies as a child and still turned out okay. Not that I recommend ever ingesting art supplies of any brand in any quantity, but I appreciate the non-toxic and frequently washable nature of Crayola products.
I look forward to reading everyone else’s posts about arts and crafts!
MaryAnne is a craft loving educator, musician, photographer, and writer who lives in Silicon Valley with her husband Mike and their four children.
Those mats are a genius idea and I just added desk protector to my shopping list. Brad is going to wonder when he see that!
Fantastic ideas as always! Love the reason for your loyalty to Crayola :)
Thanks for the ideas. I bookmarked the geometric felt shapes as something I want to do for my boys. I also loved the placemat ideas.
Great ideas! I think I'll do the geometric shapes–I've been wanting to do something with all the felt I have.
Thank you for stopping at my blog and offering some encouragement. Your children are positively lucky, and Emma clearly inherited your talents. Her drawings are amazingly detailed. I will bookmark this post and come back for ideas soon :)
You do amaze me!!
I love the activity mat idea! We'll be sure to check out your link. Thanks!
Great craft ideas! I also love Crayola products.
Fun craft ideas. I really like your geometric felt shapes.
I love your reminder about using Nature for art.
The houseplan map looks like an idea I would have fun doing too!
Thanks for linking to this week's picnic table talk.