Arts and Crafts Projects

As a parent, you’re going to hear the inevitable, “I’m bored” from your children or your own proclamation, “Turn off that television” sooner or later.  So what to do with children who are tired of their toys, their friends, or playing outside?  Or what if it is one of those cabin-fever inducing bouts of nasty weather that leave you no choice but to get creative, and fast?  Arts and crafts projects are great distractions and ways to encourage your children to express their creativity and burn off some energy. 

Keep a Well Stocked Art Area

You don’t have to be a Martha Stewart Mom to have a well-stocked arts and crafts area in your house.  In fact, you don’t even need a specific place; a box or cabinet of art supplies, and a covered table or work surface will do just fine.  Any place where your children can get messy, and a place to display artwork, will allow your little ones to indulge their creative energies.

Keep on hand lots of construction paper, pipe cleaners, glue and glue sticks (easy to manage and not so messy), safety scissors, and markers, crayons, and pencils.  An easel, lots of newsprint, and washable paints and brushes are all basics that will satisfy your budding artists. 

Holiday and Seasonal Themes

Children get understandably excited about holidays, so channel that excitement into creating crafts to give as gifts of decorate your house.  Even toddlers can help make cards by stamping designs with washable ink.  Older children can cut up magazines, recycled holiday cards, and ribbon to make wrapping paper and gift tags at Christmas, Hanukah, and Valentine ’s Day. 

Think of using articles from your yard as “found object art” pieces.  Pinecones, gumballs, and leaves make wonderful fall centerpieces.  You can preserve particularly pretty leaves between sheets of waxed paper fused with a warm iron. Put these in your windows for a stained glass effect your children will be proud of.
If you can take your projects outside, your children will enjoy working with sand art.  Use a paintbrush to apply glue to construction paper or cardstock, and let your child sprinkle sand onto the glue, creating beach scenes for summer fun. 

Look Around the House

Children delight in finding uses for everyday objects, stimulating their creativity and encouraging recycling.  See what kinds of sculptures you can make by fixing household odds and ends like paper clips, bottle caps, and other “junk” into modeling clay for one-of-a-kind three dimensional pieces. 
Paper plates and cups make excellent media for art projects.  Add some elastic thread, and you have hanging sculptures that turn in the wind, or cut out eye holes and add ribbon, strings, and whatever else your artist desires for unique masks.

Save old jar lids and affix magnetic tape to the back, paste a photograph to the inside of the lid, and you have an instant decorative refrigerator magnet.  Soup and drink concentrate cans, covered in contact paper, make personalized pencil holders. Air dry modeling compounds or those you can bake in your kitchen oven will make wonderful trinket holders anyone would be proud to display.

So long as you have the patience to let your children make a mess, which can be trying at times, you’ll find plenty of alternatives to the television or computer and ways to keep little hands busy and creative energies satisfied.  Check parenting websites and magazines, cruise your local arts and crafts store, and be on the lookout for household products you can recycle into found art objects.  Let your children have free creative reign over their projects, and remember to marvel at and proudly display their handicrafts.