When school holidays kick in, parents scramble to figure out what to do with their children. If you don’t want your kids to watch too much television or you’d like to encourage their imagination rather than have them play with their usual toys, then check out some of the easy craft ideas you can do with your children at home.
Easy Craft Ideas for Kids
Decorate Shirts with Stamps
Simply pick up a plain shirt in a solid color, white usually works best, in your child’s size. Lay down some newspaper or another protective cover on a hard surface that your child can easily reach. Use rubber stamps or find objects from around the house to dip in fabric paint and then stamp onto the shirt.
Try to think creatively. A great example would be to cut the end off a bell pepper, dip it in green paint, and stamp the shirt for a fun and festive homemade St. Patrick’s Day outfit. You could dip in pretty pastel paints as well and make a flower garden.
Tiny Fairy Garden
Speaking of flower gardens, chances are your kids would love to make a tiny fairy garden to attract some magical playmates. This is a great craft to encourage imaginative thinking as well as reinforcing motor skills and teaching them to appreciate the process of growing plants themselves.
Pick up a small pot or planter, or repurpose a broken one you already have, along with some soil, flowers, rocks, and other tiny decorations. You can even get them a children’s gardening kit with planting tools they could use again. Then let their creative side take over and build a beautiful garden for their fairy friends. Sprinkle the whole thing with fairy dust (glitter) to make it even more magical!
Make a Family Tree
Introduce your child to your family’s history and all the people who make up your family by crafting a family tree. To keep it simple, you can find a template to print online or, if you have some artistic skills, draw your own tree. Start with your immediate family and branch out to include your child’s grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, etc. When you get done, you can frame and hang the tree somewhere in your house to help them remember who everyone is and how they are related.
Homemade Skeeball
Bring one of the most popular arcade games without having to go anywhere by building a makeshift skeeball game from materials you probably have lying around the house. You can make this as simple or as complicated as you and your child desire.
For a really simple skeeball game, you only need a couple laundry baskets or boxes, a large cardboard box, and some tape. Make a ramp from the large cardboard box and aim it towards the laundry baskets or other boxes as goals. Grab some lightweight plastic balls and have a blast! If you have a lot of time and your child is really into it, you can make multiple ramps or play with the sizes and number of goals.
Paper Plane Competition
Hosting a paper plane competition is another super simple craft for kids to do at home that does not require a lot of a set-up or prep work. Just grab a few sheets of paper and some tutorials on how to make paper planes if you do not know how. Then find another piece of cardboard that you do not mind cutting.
Cut out several different-sized holes and then paint over the cardboard and label the holes with different points, the smaller holes being worth more and the bigger holes being worth less. Build your paper airplanes and see who can score the most points by flying them through the holes. If you printed off more than one way to build paper planes, try to see which version flies the best.
Shell Memory Game
This craft doubles as an easy, fun home activity and helps your child develop their memory skills. If you do not have any seashells at home to play with, you can use small rocks or other natural objects that you can write on and lay flat, or use it as a good excuse to take your child for a beach day.
Once you have around 20 shells, write down numbers and their spelling, animals and their habitats, countries and their capitals, or another combination of things you want your child to learn to make matching shell pairs. Flip them upside down in a tray in a random order and let your child flip them over and over like a traditional memory game.