My kiddos love anything to do with arts and crafts. If I would let them, they would play with Play-dough, paint, and all things messy every day. They also love to color and do "projects." The old teacher in me loves to provide activities for them to do and I am fortunate that I can go to my storeroom and pull a folder for any season and most topics young kids love and have plenty to keep them entertained. I go in spurts with this, though. This year I'd like to make sure that I have at least two projects for the little ones to do each week and I am going to create a space specifically designed for messy and crafty fun.
Let's start with the space. Right now I have a small two-person table set up in the kitchen. Ever since we moved in, I have envisioned using one of the rooms in our house as a place for the kids to do their art and craft activities, as well as storing all of the materials. The room I am using has wood floors, so it makes it a bit easier to clean up. I finally splurged (thanks to some Christmas money the kids received) and purchased a large rectangular table and four colored chairs from Discount School supply. They will finally have plenty of space to work. I already have a little Closet Maid cabinet with a few shelves inside to store their paper, crayons, and miscellaneous supplies that I don't mind if they get into unsupervised. I plan to have my husband hang a few shelves in the new room to put supplies like paint, play-dough, glue, scissors, shaving cream, and other materials that they can't have unless they are supervised. I saw an idea on Pinterest to use dish drying racks to store coloring books and crayons, so I am hoping to utilize this idea for the coloring and activity books that they have that reflect their current interests. To round it off, I want to create an area to display their masterpieces. My goal is to have this all complete by the end of January.
If I can get organized, I'd like to take some time on Sundays to put together the materials I will need for a few easy projects for the little kiddos to do each week. They love to make things and show them off to their dad and grandparents when they come over. I must admit, our wall of creations reflects where we are in life. We may not have a lot of professional art pieces on our walls, but we have plenty of original creations by the kiddos!
Today we decided to celebrate the last day of winter vacation by having a gingerbread day. I pulled out a few old activities that I thought they would enjoy and we will top it off by baking gingerbread cookies this afternoon. My older two did a simple dot-to-dot that I found online as well as a glyph activity coloring parts of a gingerbread man by answering questions and selecting a color. I had picked up some foam gingerbread cut-outs at Target from the dollar bin awhile back, so they can decorate those, too. They love the story of the Gingerbread Man, so they were quite excited to spend a day on these activities!
Gingerbread Glyph Activity
Decorating Cookies
Cutting Out the Gingerbread Men
No comments:
Post a Comment