Indulge in the world of art and craft with these fantastic sites curated to provide direct assistance on some great art projects that kids could take using everyday items found at home. Enjoy and let your creative site roll.
“Raised salt painting is an all-time favorite kids art activity that is loved by all ages from toddlers on up. Glue, salt, and watercolors are all you need for this simple art activity, also known as salty watercolors.
When we get on a roll, we go with it. That’s been the case lately with all of our flower petal and contact paper suncatchers. We’ve made nature suncatchers in the past, but have never quite gotten into it as much as this past month with the flower petal art box, the flower stained glass door, and subsequent flower mandalas.
We’re always trying out new playdough play ideas. In fact, playdough is one of our go-to materials and activities for everyday creative play. We keep a kitchen drawer stocked with playdough, playdough tools, and playdough “decorations” (toothpicks, beads, googly eyes, feathers). It’s easily accessible and frequently brought out, either by the kids when they want to make playdough cakes to sell in their living room store or by me when I see that they might need a diversion or easy activity.
Marble painting for kids is an easy and fun action art activity that results in a wonderfully abstract work of art. Fun variations included in this article!
Spin painting is a favorite kids art activity that can be done with a salad spinner or with a commercial spin painter. This post shares both fun methods.
It’s a construction project that can be as simple as poking a bunch of toothpicks in playdough for young children or as challenging as building a geodesic dome or tower for older kids and adults.
Children can explore magnetic properties and engineering with hands on learning and open-ended exploration. Building cool contraptions in an open-ended way helps kids become creative thinkers and problem solvers, which is vital to their future success and even the future of our world. If you are looking for fun ways your kids can learn engineering from the experts, Sylvan Learning offers a STEM focused program, the Sylvan EDGE. EDGE provide hands-on learning opportunities in classes focused on Robotics, Engineering, Coding, and Math Edge. These programs give students the confidence and skills to be successful in the future global workforce.
“We love buying ourselves a box o’ wood bits—something we’ve done a few times over the years—and turning them into wood sculptures, toys, and 3-D collages…
These watercolor techniques for kids are exciting and interesting alternatives to basic watercolor painting. The ideas include combining watercolor painting with salt, rubbing alcohol, different resist methods, and more!
Watercolor resist techniques are fun for kids to explore! Here are 6 to try, including crayon resist, glue resist, sticker resist, wax resist, and more.
“Melted bead suncatchers are easy to make from kids plastic pony beads. Follow these step-by-step instructions to make a beautiful and durable suncatcher.
The instructions called for a warming tray which I did not have, didn’t see at the store, and couldn’t find secondhand (I may not have tried hard enough).
Homemade playdough is better than store bought for so many reasons! It’s easy to make, cheap, and you can make a big batch which really allows kids to use it more expressively and naturally. Plus the homemade stuff is soft and smells good. And when you make your own, you can add your own personal touch with color, essential oils, and glitter (great for pairing your playdough play with seasons, holidays, party themes, and mood!).
We used Crayola air dry clay and thought it worked well for this project. We’ve tried Sculpt-It air dry clay before as well and it worked okay, but not as well. Homemade air dry clay would be worth a try as well. As would regular potter’s clay.
Gifts, especially those created by kids, don’t have to cost a lot of money. In fact, the perfect materials for a thoughtful gift may be sitting in your recycling bin. Giving old items new life is not only green, it’s a lot of fun. It is so cool to take something destined for the trash and turn it into something beautiful and useful. And when we do a craft like this with our children, we are teaching them to see “garbage” in a new, creative light. With little more than a handful of old keys, a piece of drift wood, string, and paint, my son and I created this DIY key wind chime. It would make a lovely gift for anyone who has a garden or balcony, a birthday present for grandma, a house warming gift for a new neighbor, and of course Mother’s Day is just around the corner.
“If you haven’t guessed already, my daughter dictates most of what we do/make for these projects and activities that I post. Yep… when she asked for a castle we made this toilet paper roll and shoebox castle. When she asked for dolls of her friends we made these toilet paper roll and ribbon roll dolls. This time Mia told me she wanted to make an airplane… what?? How do I do that? So! I came up with this quick little Airplane Clothespin Kids Craft.
These bright and cheery bowls are perfect for storing all of your small trinkets and treasures (my guys like to put Legos and special rocks in theirs), and they make a special gift for friends and grandparents.
Milk carton birdhouses are a classic quick and easy kids craft, and they continue to be a favorite of children everywhere. My boys recently asked if they could make their own diy bird feeders, so we headed to our favorite place to find craft supplies – the recycling bin! We paired recycled milk and juice cartons with fun and colorful craft supplies to create these cheery diy milk carton birdhouses, and the birds LOVE them!
This cardboard robot collage is guaranteed to be a hit! I love this kid’s craft because it works well for all ages, and you can customize it with literally anything you have on hand. This is a fun project to do.
“If someone you know is going through a hard time, whether they’ve lost a family member or a pet, or are dealing with an illness, sending a long distance hug is a great way to talk to your kids about what the person is dealing with and emphasize how kindness can make others feel better. This is a great way to encourage thoughts of kindness toward friends and family far away, or even someone in the same city who might need a hug.
What you need: construction paper; crayons or markers; yarn or string; glue; scissors. Envelopes and stamps.
What to do:
Have the kids trace their hands and cut out the shapes.
Cut a length of string or yarn and glue one end to each hand cut-out.
Write a message on each hand, or decorate the hands. A add a small card telling the recipient that they are receiving a long distance hug.
Mail the hug.
Take a walk in my shoes This activity is designed to help students identify different perspectives and how they relate to conflict. The students are given a scenario and different images of shoes are placed in a circle on the floor. Each shoe has a different perspective that relates to the scenario they were given. The students walk around to each shoe putting themselves in “someone else’s shoes”. This teaches them to recognize different perspectives and how it might cause conflict.
This sweet printable from Picklebums gives you 4 sets of glasses to cut out and decorate (plus wear when you’re done!). While decorating our glasses, I talked to the boys about how we can choose to see everything in a happy or sad way. If we see the good in something, we are being optimistic.
I asked the boys about several situations, such as if they are given a new food they don’t think they will like. The first thought may be, “I don’t like that, yuck!” But if we put on our “Optimistic Glasses” and choose to see the good in the situation, we may say something like, “I’ll take one bite just to try something new… this will be fun!”
We had fun creating the glasses, and then doing several role plays that helped us discuss what “being optimistic” means.
Rock balancing, also known as stone stacking, stone building, and stone balancing is when you balance or stack rocks on top of each other in various positions to produce beautiful land art sculptures or stone cairns.
Magnet painting is science and art wrapped up in a colorful package. And it’s a super simple set-up project too. STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art & Math) at it’s easiest 🙂 This post contains affiliate links.
Howdy! Today I’m sharing a STEAM activity that combines art and math. Put on your creative hats and grab your favorite color pencils. We’re trying our hand at the Mystery Grid Art Challenge!
llustrate the frog life cycle with pom poms and pipe cleaners by making pom pom frogs, tadpoles and eggs! At first, a pom pom frog was just a simple craft to do with kids, but we were quite impressed with the potential of pipe cleaner articulation and ended up building a frog small world.
Learning about moon phases is a fun science activity for kids. Kids love learning about the moon, and the moon’s names, particularly “gibbous” will give your kids a giggle while they are learning about the moon. Try this fun glow in the dark moon phases mobile to go along with your phases of the moon study!
A while ago, we did a color mixing with Arduino coding and electric circuit. That activity is designed for older kids who already have programming experience. Today we share a fun activity for kids who have no computer coding and electric circuit experience. Kids can use RGB color codes to color a picture drawn in Microsoft Word. This is a digital way to learn about colors. Kids learn basic coding concepts that computers talk in a special language “code”, we need learn codes to be able to talk to computers telling computers what to do. This activity is designed for young kids. With some help, kids as young as preschool can do it, as long as they know how to type in numbers on computers.
The Babe was given a prism as a very cool party favor the other day. I’ve been itching to do some light science and art with her so this gave me the perfect set up for a Five Minute Craft.
Somewhere over the rainbow lies a fun way to learn geometry. I promise. Because there aren’t many better ways to learn math than by combining it with bright colors and messy paint. Well, maybe candy, but this comes in close second 🙂 Rainbow Geometry Painting is as easy as laying out the supplies and letting the rainbow creativity happen. This post contains affiliate links.
How do you like to remember things you do and see when traveling with the family? I know some families like to journal. Sharing pictures on social media is a great way, too. We also like to reinforce some of the cool things we’ve learned by doing activities after we get home. Like recreating petroglyphs that we saw on the Big Island of Hawaii last year. So we made some really cool sand play dough and got drawing and carving!
This project is another one of those where our mistakes turned our project into something a little different. Things really did not turn out the way I envisioned. But despite the original disappointment in the art presentation, I have to say I kind of love how they look. I also know how I would do things differently in the future. The best science experiments are those that teach valuable lessons, and we learned a lot from this project.
Combining math with art can be so much fun! Today I want to show you some geometric math art with circles that we did this past week. We made flowers using math.
“This is pretty much the prettiest science experiment we’ve ever done. Through the magical chemistry of polymers, you can turn recycled plastic into a beautiful flower garden or bouquet. So save your plastic cups and plates from that party or snacktime at school and make someone just as happy as real flowers do. This is the Recycled Plastic Flowers Art and Science Project and it’s part of 28 Days of Hands-On STEM Activities for Kids, a fun blog series in February. This post contains affiliate links.
