Welcome back to our Creative Kids feature! Every week I share a new post from a guest blogger relating to how we can get creative, arty or messy with our little ones. This week I’m really pleased to be sharing this post by Gemma Hall at Mummy’s Waisted who is currently theming her crafts around one of mine and my son’s favourite things…
We’re not really a crafty family – actually, the truth is I’m not a crafty Mum, the kids like nothing more than getting stuck in with paints, glue and glitter. I think I normally shy away from such things, as I compare myself to the perfect Pinterest mums who can magic The Brighton Pavilion out of some toilet rolls and grey paint. That said though, I did manage to make my son’s nativity innkeeper costume…..by copying a Pinterest photo.
My son’s topic at school this term has been dinosaurs, so I thought let’s have a go and see what we can do. He’s five and my daughter is two and a half.
I keep hold of interesting bits of rubbish when I can (mainly egg boxes and the cereal boxes) so I had a look on Google at ‘make dinosaur from egg box’. I got the children to choose which picture we would attempt to make, my son chose a triceratops and my daughter chose a dragon.
I got everything ready that I thought we would need, and off we went. It was a bit of a case of sitting on my hands to let them have free reign, but actually I think it turned out rather well.
These are the things I have learnt from the experience:
- don’t get hung up on it looking exactly like the picture! It’s absolutely fine if the dragon has 10 eyes and a multicoloured tongue, or the triceratops has dinosaur stickers inside!
- our messy mat is not big enough, thankfully we have a wooden floor, next time I will spread out some extra newspaper as well
- the kids (and their clothes) got covered in paint, even in places that aprons wouldn’t cover (like my daughter’s face), so old clothes are definitely a must
- always have some extra pieces of paper / big pieces of card handy for extra painting – my son ended up painting some pictures of his favourites dinosaurs and even practising his writing of ‘brontosaurus’
- save some yoghurt pots or similar for pouring paint into, so you can just chuck them out afterwards – paint does not wash out easily
- have lots of paintbrushes, one for each colour if possible, especially if you are a bit funny about colour mixing (don’t even get me started on Playdough!)
- sellotape doesn’t stick to egg boxes and ‘craft’ glue is frankly useless
Author Bio
Gemma is a mum to two children and has recently changed career from accountancy to internet marketing. She runs Waist Trainer UK and writes a blog as Mummy’s Waisted, which centres around her attempts to fit healthy living and fitness around family life.
Find Gemma on Twitter as @waisttrainer_uk or follow her Facebook page here.
Have you done a creative project with your kids that you’d like to share? Do you have a brilliant messy play task? If you’d like to write a guest blog post around getting arty, crafty or messy with kids please email me at butterflymum83@gmail.com. Find out more about the series here.
