4 Art and craft DIY ideas for your child

I am a DO IT YOURSELF mom. I enjoy making stuff with my children that not only keeps them occupied but also explores their creative side and use their imaginations. My two girls aged 7 and 4 respectively are my inspiration behind these and I plan age-appropriate activities keeping them in my mind. Following are few activities which I have shared for both preschoolers as well as older children, which involves easy simple steps and  are fun to do with your children.

BLOW PAINTING ART:

It’s a wonderful activity for toddlers as well as older children with a very simple technique that encourages exploration, investigation and little bit of scientific thought. Children enjoy making  the paint, dance and move across the paper using a straw. Creating different patterns using imagination and giving them crazy looks adds to the fun element.

1. Crazy Bugs blow painting art (for preschoolers):

It’s quite essential to introduce our toddlers to the whole idea of germs; viruses and bacteria both deadly as well as friendly and reinforcing the concept of cleanliness and maintaining hygiene by washing hands time and again. Inspired by this idea, I tried creating germs with blow painting. Pasting googly eyes and making weird as well as funny features using sketch pens. Giving different features also helps them to understand facial expressions.

You are going to need:

• Bright colored paints and water mixture
• Dropper
• Straw
• Plain paper
• Sketch pens
• Googly eyes

Procedure:

• Take a thick sheet of paper (colred or plain as per your choice).
• Drop small drops of different colored paint and water mix onto your paper using dropper(refines fine motor skills).
• Use a straw to blow the blobs of paint out in all directions (helps stretch vocal chords).
• Let it dry.
• Stick googly eyes (one or both) and draw in features to give different expressions from sad to happy, angry to surprised, grumpy to relaxed using sketch pens.

2. Spooky Trees with Blow painting (for children 5 year and above):

You are going to need:

• Colored Art paper
• Water colour paints
• Straw
• Dropper
• Paint brush

Procedure:

• Take a colored thick art paper sheet. I have used purple colored sheet to give it a spooky look. You could use any colour sheet or even paint it with dfferent colours to make interesting backgrounds.
• Draw a horizontal line with a pencil at 10cms from below.
• Drop some droplets of black paint mixed water with a dropper at 3 cms and 2 cm alterantively on the line drawn with a dropper.
• Position your straw close to the drops  and blow upwards through it on the paper to create long spooky looking branches.
• With a thick painting brush draw trunks in downward direction where drops of paint and water mix were put.
• Let it dry.
• Using silver colour pencil to draw a crescent shaped moon and stars.
• With a white pencil make outline of the trees, the branches, the moon and the stars.

More ideas: Also try making monster faces or crazy hair with blow art painting to make cover page of your magazines or notebooks as shown in the image.

ANIMAL MASKS (for children 5 years and above)

I love incorporating animal crafts in my list as this theme takes kids to a different world alltogether. They can identify with and relate better to talking animals and these animals masks are just the right props to be used with stories which have animals as their characters.

3. Tiger Mask:

You are going to need:

• A Paper plate
• Scissors
• Black marker or sketch pen
• Acrylic Paints (black,orange and red)
• Paint brush
• Punching machine
• Elastic

Procedure:

• Draw a tiger on a paper plate including facial features such as eyes, nose,ears, lips, whskers and  stripes.
• Cut out alongwith the outline.
• Make two holes in the mask for the eyes with a pencil.
• Paint the paper plate with orange colour and stripes with black colour.
• Colour the mouth red.
• Leave it to dry.
• Once its dry make an outline  and the whiskers with a black marker pen.
• Punch two small holes on either side to put an elastic string.
• Tie a knot on both sides to the elastic string after passing them through the small holes punched.
• Put on the mask and be ready to ROAR!

More ideas: For preschoolers we can use printable templates and ask them to colour with crayons. An adult can help in cutting out the mask, punching holes and attaching an elastic string.

Also you could try out making other animals masks and use pom-poms take make nose and decorate these with feathers or buttons etc.

4. BUBBLE WRAP PAINTING:

You will need:

• Bubble wrap
• Scissors
• Paint
• Paint brushes
• 5/6 A4 sized Colored paper sheets
• A Colored A3 sheet
• Rolling pin
• Rubber bands
• Double tape
• Colored strings
• Shapes Stickers

Procedure:

• Cut out a section of bubble wrap long enough to cover the length of rolling pin.
• Roll it around the rolling pin and fix it with two rubber bands one at each end of the rolling pin.
• Cover small portions of bubble wrap with different paints with a paint brush.
• Roll the rolling pin on different colored sheets to get impressions of bubbule wrap.
• Cut out different shapes on these sheets. For instance a star, oval, triangle, rhombus etc. to make balloons and the boy ( as shown in the image).
• Set these cut outs on the A3 sheet as shown in the picture and then paste them with a double tape.
• Attach strings to the balloons.
• Decorate the balloons with shapes stickers and also use these to make eyes and shirt buttons.

More ideas: Older children (5years and above), could even color the background on their own and use bubble wrap sheets cut outs to make sea water animals and give effects to water to make an underwater scenery  or a scenery with mountains,  trees and waterfall  using their imagination as shown in the image.

These DIY activities are a wonderful way to strengthen the beautiful bond that you share with your child as not only you both would be working towards a common goal but also the happiness that you both would share seeing the finshed product is pricesless.With winter holidays just around the corner, I am sure you would enjoy these DIY activities with your munchkins. Please pour in your feedback and suggestions to make it a fruitful blog.