7 Ways to Engage with Your Kids at Home with Crafts

With school lessons moved online and so much of our time spent indoors, it’s important to get the kids involved with something not screen-based, something that can stimulate their minds but also has them physically engaged in a completing task. Therein lies the potential of old-fashioned arts and crafts.

Even better, many of the following crafts involve preliminary tasks like collecting items and making mediums, as well as multiple steps to complete the project. This means that the crafts can span several days, and/or they can provide hours of entertainment. Afterwards, many of them become toys that can further occupy the kids in creative pursuits.

Not only do they keep the kids busy, but they hardly cost a thing, just time, which seems to be in abundance of late. So, here’s what to do with it:

1. Make & Mold Clay

Most of us grew up with Play-Doh, which is just modeling clay. Well, rather than just ordering up a set, part of Play-Doh playtime can be actually making the clay itself. That’s more time crafting, and it will likely mean the kids will be more into playing with the clay they personally made. The recipe is super simple.

• Collect the ingredients: 1 cups flour, ½ cup salt, ½ cup water
• Add flour if it’s too wet, or add water if it’s too dry
• Knead it until it fairly smooth, a la dough
• Divide it into sections and add food coloring (or washable paint)
• Now, it’s time to get artistic!

2. Use Toilet Paper Tubes to Create Things

Since we all rushed out and cleared the supermarkets of toilet paper, there is now undoubtedly the potential to collect a lot of toilet paper tubes. And, nothing is quite so prevalent in kid crafts as toilet paper tubes. They can be converted into:

• Rockets
• Animals
• People
• Monsters
• Robots
• Collages

3. Make An Awesome Aquarium

Rather than going the actual aquarium route, all those complications of animal, food, and water, why not just have the kids make their own aquariums? It takes a long time (lots of steps), and all you need is a box (maybe from cereal or something roughly aquarium sized) and some construction paper. To kick it up a little, it might be fun to gather up remnants of seashell collections, maybe some sand, and other aquatic things to help weight the bottom of the aquarium.

4. DIY Bubble Kit

For those kids (and parents) fortunate enough to have a balcony, patio, backyard or some other access to outside, few things make children happier than blowing bubbles. Perhaps one of those few things is actually making the bubble kit themselves, including the packaging, bubble wands and liquid magic. And, that’s totally possible with just a handful of ingredients that are likely in the pantry already.

• Check out the YouTube video for a quick and easy bubble blowing liquid.
• For the bubble jar, use an old plastic (for safety) peanut butter jar or something with a large enough opening. Have the kids decorate it for a bonus activity.
• To make the bubble wand, take the flimsy, snap-on plastic lid from the top of an old container, hole-punch it and attach it to some sort of handle. Again, it adds to the process, meaning more time spent.

5. Play With Chalk & Crayons

Of course, drawing and coloring pictures is one of the great childhood activities parents go to frequently, and drawing where normally prohibited is even more exciting. Throw making your own sidewalk/driveway chalk into the mix, or even DIY bathtub (soap) crayons, and it may just create an all-out giggle fest, maybe even an extra easy bath time. And, of course, a bit of sidewalk chalk can always turn into a rousing session of hopscotch to use up some energy.

6. Handprint Crafts

It’s important to never discount the power of a traced hand in the arts-and-crafts world. Handprint crafts come in many iterations, but at their most basic, they involve little more than our hands, some paint and some paper. For the younger crowd, a tree (draw the trunk and use hand prints as limbs) and peacocks are classic handprint art. Getting into more advanced crafting, Andy Warhol-style handprints and negative space (painting around the hand rather than leaving an actual handprint) can draw out some deeper creativity.

7. Origami

Many of us have adopted the habit of recycling stuff from the printer or documents that have come in the mail. Before sending them off, however, they could be used for crafty pursuits in the way of origami. There are all sorts of animals that can children can make and a slew of YouTube videos to supply step-by-step instructions and visual demonstrations. The beauty of making animals or even simple paper airplanes is that they can then become toys that’ll entertain for, on the right day, hours.

Well, that’s not to bad. That’s a craft project for every day of the week, and the potential for repeat entertainment from the work put in. None of these items has to remain for long, most can be fashioned from repurposed materials and the process is a great time to bond in a new, exciting way.

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