Tag: kids crafts

Crafting With House Of York – Easy Crafts With HouseHold Items

Crafting With House Of York – Easy Crafts With HouseHold Items

Posted on by Rebecca

March is officially “Craft Month” and boy oh boy, do we have a lot up our sleeves 🙂

The beauty of crafting with kids is that it often uses things typically found around the house. Egg cartons, tooth picks, pegs, cupcake cases, you name it; we will find something to craft with it 🙂

I also love that arts and crafts expand our children’s imaginations. They encourage independent and pragmatic thinking, which in a world filled with television and media, is something we so need to work on!

Together with House of York, one of South Africa’s most loves household brands, we have been playing around with everyday wooden objects that we could turn into Arts and Crafts.

First up in our craft spree are their skewers.

Traditionally used in South Africa for braai’s, we incorporated the skewers into some fine motor skill building sticks.

Stick a skewer into some playdough and let your kids thread cheerio’s, froot loops, or pasta onto the sticks. It requires huge concentration for little hands to thread those objects onto the skewers. Add in beads or use different coloured fruits to bring in pattern recognition; get your kids to follow an order of objects that you placed to encourage repetition. A simple, fun, learning activity that the little one’s love!

Next up are toothpicks.

The possibilities here are endless, I honestly had to limit myself to two activities.

First up we worked on our STEM skills. I built a molecular structure that the boys then had to replicate with their toothpicks and baby marshmallows (you can use sweets, or any fruits like grapes or apples for this as well). My 5-year-old worked on this with uninterrupted concentration and asked me to make more! My little one however (he’s 3), managed the basic concept of a square and triangle. This activity encourages 3D thinking and I LOVE the concentration that took place.

I then took a whole bunch of toothpicks and dyed them different colours with food colouring. They are so pretty, this could have been an activity, toothpick rainbows? Why not?

The activity I chose was based around creating pictures. To up the interest a little, I took some sticky plastic wrap (the kind you cover books with) and stuck it onto the sliding door. You could use paper, but I just did want to get hands too sticky with glue. The kids stuck their toothpicks onto the contact plastic and created their own pictures.

Lastly, let’s look to one of our favourite household items to create with, pegs!

Not only are they super affordable, but they are a perfect size for little hands to hold and play with. They also offer one of the best fine motor activities you can ever give to a child; simply hanging clothes on a line. The pincher grasp and squeeze of a peg is crucial for healthy development, and that really doesn’t take any creativity!

OK, I may have gotten involved in a some of the finer detail on these ones, but the boys painted the wooden pegs. We then decided on what animals we wanted to create and how we would do it. We made crocodiles, birds on a “branch” (Skewer), a Giraffe as well as some super easy butterflies, which the kids pretty much did themselves.

I LOVE how these turned out and they are now proudly displayed on our “Gallery” wall.

So, there you have it. Using affordable items, often found around the house, we created several different craft activities. This “Crafting” Month of March I encourage you all to spend more time doing things WITH your kids. Whatever it may be, the act of doing something with them is priceless and they will value the time with you forever.

Christmas Salt Dough Ornaments

Christmas Salt Dough Ornaments

Posted on by Rebecca

You may remember from last year that we made Salt Dough Christmas Ornaments. Its something we do every year and it always ties in nicely with teachers end of year gifts and homemade sentiments for family and friends.

This year I was inspired by Sugar and Paper Parties insanely gorgeous sugar cookies, I’m not one to attempt anything like the masterpieces that Liezl creates (well actually I did and they looked like a dogs breakfast), so we decided to make ornaments for the tree with our snow globe cookie cutter. (Because painting is alot easier then icing 🙂 )

Apart from putting in the oven and taking it out again, this is literally one craft the kids can do by themselves from start to finish.

The Recipe has 3 ingredients and is SUPER easy:

4 cups flour

1 cup salt

1.5 cups water

  • Preheat your oven to 100 degrees Celsius.
  • Combine all of your ingredients and knead. If your dough is too dry add a little bit more water.
  • Roll out the dough to a thickness of about 1.5 cm
  • Using a cookie cutter of your choice cut out your shapes, if you are making handprints, use a side plate to cut a circle first and then have your child place their hand on that circle.

  • Using a straw, make a hole in the top for where you want to hang your salt dough ornament.
  • Bake for about 2 hours. If your ornaments are still soft to touch, put back in for another hour. (It will depend on your thickness how long you need to bake for. The thinner ornaments will take less time but thicker may take more).
  • Once cooled, decorate as you wish. We used our favourite Dala paints, the acrylic works best and lots of  glitter, especially at Christmas time.
  • Finish with a varnish.

I normally do this over 2 or 3 days. The first day we roll and make bake our ornaments, on the second we paint and on the third day I spray it with a coast of clear varnish.

To end off our homemade gifts we made simple cards. Christmas Trees easily painted with plastic forks.

Remember to head on over to :

Justamamma for more easy christmas cards for kids

Ali from Earth to Ali Photography for her utterly gorgeous salt dough foot and handprints 

This.is.bentleys.world for her ridiculously cute toilet roll crafts

Minimatissediaries for dreamy pine cone painting

Michelle from Mayalief for her exquisitie homemade wrapping paper

Halloween Slime

Halloween Slime

Posted on by Rebecca

Halloween is not something we traditionationally “celebrate” as a family, Ive spoken about it before but I really am against all the blood an gore it represents in todays world. But I can never resist jumping on board with the arts and crafts. You may remember the ooey gooey slime filled sensory tray we did last year. This year we have found a family event thats more than just your traditional “trick or treating” and the boys are a little excited that they have the opportunity to dress up. (You can see more about that on my facebook page).

That being said I wanted to move away from the traditional “sweet giving”. I came across this idea last year on Best Ideas for Kids and I couldnt wait to try it. I turned the “ghost” into a mummy, but there are so many options to do. You can make a large batch of one kind or make them all! Either way, kids will love receiving these adorable Halloween slime jars.

I tried a new slime recipe for this one, though I do prefer my original recipe, which you can find here, as it yields a larger portion of slime but uses the same amount of glue. For gifts however, this is perfect.

Ingredients you will need for Halloween Slime

This will make one batch, so repeat three times, one for each colour.  

  • 1 bottle of liquid glue (I use Bostik arts and crafts glue). 100 ml. For Frankenstein I used a clear craft glue. So you will need 3 bottles of glue
  • Orange food colouring , Green food colouring. Glitter (optional)
  • Just under 1/2 TBSP of Baking Soda
  • 1/2 TBSP of Contact lense solution – Make sure your brand contains boric acid. As with my original recipe with borax, the activiating agent is the boric acid
  • Optional: add 1 TBSP of water to your glue before adding baking soda if you’d like a stretchier slime.

To make the jars

  • Glass mason jars
  • Black Felt
  • Glue Gun
  • Googly eyes
  • Old bandage

Directions:

  1. Get a 3 bowls to mix your slime into
  2. Pour the bottles of glue into each bowl. Use white glue for the ghost and pumpkin slime. Clear glue for Frankenstein.
  3. Place a drop of orange food colouring into one of the white bowls and a drop of green into the clear
  4. Add in your 1/2 TBSP of baking soda and mix in thoroughly. If you want a slightly stetchier slime , add 1 TBSP of water here.
  5. Now add in your contact lens solution. I always eye ball this part. Start by using half of what the recipe calls for and mix. If your slime is not forming enough, add in the rest. If you find it is still too sticky you can add a bit more.
  6. Mix until your slime forms and begins to harden. Knead for quite some time with your hands.  If it’s not the desirable consistency keep kneading.
  7. Create your little mason jars. For the pumpkin slime I cut out the pumpkins face out of black felt and used the hot glue gun to stick it on. For Frankenstein I used black felt and googly eyes for the Frankenstein jars. The mummy was just google eyes and cut up pieces of bandage.

Now have fun and play! Of course once my boys finished playing, all 3 of the colours were mixed up. We will be giving out one bottle each so hopefully that wont happen to our friends 🙂 Happy playing!

10 “At Home” Activities For Kids To Do During The Holidays

10 “At Home” Activities For Kids To Do During The Holidays

Posted on by Rebecca

Previously holiday breaks during the school term were never a big thing, because I worked from home and had my mornings free, it meant that I was on hand to entertain the kids. We would adventure, we would play, we would explore. Fast-forward a few years and now I’m not at home, I’m in an office, (like 80% of South African mothers), and my “mom guilt” is going into overdrive that my kids are sitting watching TV all day. I now fully understand “holiday clubs” at school.

So, I’ve been thinking…. thinking of activities to set up for the boys that they can play with limited supervision. I’m lucky enough to have a fantastic nanny to take care of them so they can enjoy a bit of a break from school, but, she has other work to do and is not on hand every single second to supervise activities. Enter good old “google”, and I am shocked. Almost all the “holiday activities” designed for children require mom to be around or set up… Scrap that plan. So, I do what I do best and get to thinking of crafts to keep them busy. That’s why I enjoy crafts so much, they stimulate kids but they also don’t require much supervision. So, they can get on with sticking, creating and crafting and everyone else can get on with their work too.

So here is my top 10 list of crafts (Ok there are 11 but I couldnt choose) to keep your kids entertained these school holidays. These do require some forward-thinking mums and dads. Setting up the night before and putting the crafts out, it shouldn’t take longer than 10 minutes and are ideally suited to children up to the age of about 7.

Paint and Play Day

Set up some paint and a variety of materials for the kids to paint on and play with. Sponges, brushes, flowers and stamps make great tools for the kids to explore with and play with different texture canvases such as foil, cardboard and bubble wrap. Make sure you place a suitable ground cover down to stop the paint from getting all over your floors.

Create a Collage

Cut up a big piece of cardboard from a leftover box to use as a nice big canvas for little hands. Gather up a variety of items, ribbons, stickers, magazine cut outs, paper doilies, muffin cases, pomp oms, anything your heart desires. Better still I normally do a craft cupboard stock up at CNA before the holidays start. You could get creative and chose specific colours. Kids love nothing more than gluing and sticking. Trust me, it’s a winner every time! Lay out all the materials on a tray for them with the glue and canvas and let them stick to their hearts content.

Create a Scavenger Hunt around the house

Hide a few objects around the house (choose distinctive things or specific pictures). Draw up a list of all the things hidden and tell the kids to go on a treasure hunt! Once they tick everything off their list tell your caregiver he/she can give them a small treat.

Clay Play

Get some good old fashioned air dry clay OR modelling clay. I prefer air dry clay as I can keep their creations forever. You can find this at any stationery store like CNA or your plastic-land/ Westpack stores. Make up a bowl yourself the night before, I often find if I am not there it is easier for my kids to see what to do when they have an example to follow. Ask your caregiver (if you aren’t home) to place down a floor protector and give each child a nice fist sized amount of clay. Let them create to their hearts content and let the final product dry in the sun. Once dry (probably by the time you are home), let them paint it.

Movie Day

I’m pretty sure this is one we have all done before. Surprise them by renting their favourite movie, or download it on Netflix. Layout some blankets and pillows (or a tent if you have one) in the lounge and pre- make some popcorn before you go to work. Let them stay in their PJ’s for the morning and watch their favourite Netflix while snuggling up with some popcorn and hot chocolate.

Create a mini activity centre

This could be done in or outside the house dependent on your situation. Create a “bean bag” toss – put a strip of tape down as the standing line and some “Hoola-Hoops”. The aim is to try and get the bag into the target area. Bowling – If you done have tenpin pins at home grab some paper cups and stack them together in a triangle shape. Using a ball or a bean bag, let your child try to knock down the cups. Golf putting – Simply take a plastic cup to use as your “hole”, the kids must try and put their ball into the cup to sink it. The possibilities are endless here.

Have a baking day

Yes, this is possible, even If you aren’t home. If your caregiver knows how to cook buy some pre- mixes from snowflake or Pillsbury. Easy ones like muffins or brownies. Lay out the ingredients the night before and the kids can mix away and then whoever is home can pop it into the oven. OR if you aren’t comfortable with the “baking” aspect they could ice some Marie Biscuits (Just make up the icing the evening before), or make some Jelly.

Montessori inspired Activities

Have a look at my blog post on my favourite Montessori activities for toddlers around the house. Most of these are independent and allow for easy clean up. Another great “keep busy” one is a good old peg board! Developing those fine motor skills while keeping them focused.

Sidewalk chalk

Buy a pack of good old sidewalk chalk from your local stationery store or plastic land. Let them draw their masterpieces wherever they feel free (outside of course). It’s the only time my boys are allowed to draw all over the walls, and the pavement outside. A quick rinse with the hose, or a rain shower will leave absolutely no trace of Picasso’s masterpiece.

Playdough invitation to play trays

My only disclaimer here would be, if your kids are younger and they will be playing partially unsupervised, maybe make your own playdough. I have a super quick recipe here. That way you can have peace of mind that it is non-toxic and “safe” if they decide to swallow a mouthful. Set out the playdough on a tray and put individual items of interest in separate containers around it. You could theme it, for example; construction you could make a brown dough, add in a few toy diggers and some “stones” (fake or real), some sticks and tools. Let them create their own little universe. Alternatively, pre- order some carefully thought out themed packs from party play dough.

Sensory Trays

Limited supervision required depending on the route you take. I often post up our sensory tray adventures on Instagram and then forget to post them on the blog, so if you are looking for ideas make sure you follow my Instagram account here. Ideas to do could include a winter wonderland (with snow made from Bicarbonate of Soda and white conditioner), an undersea adventure, either made with jelly, cornflour and water or sludge, or an outer space galaxy made with some painted black rice, marbles, stars and figurines.

You can have a look at my sensory mud tray here or a cloud dough experience here.

 

So there are some activities to get you going, now that I’ve started I have a couple more up my sleeve. Sometimes you just have to write things out a little to get your mind going! I hope I’ve inspired you in some way. The “Mom Guilt” will never subside but we can make ourselves feel a little better.