Colorful crafts to keep kids entertained
When your kids are ready for a break from homework, soccer practice and the rest of their usual busy routines, try some of these ideas for activities and crafts.
Whether you’re planning a birthday party, getting ready for the holidays or just looking for interesting rainy-day crafts, the following projects and tips will help you and your children learn, imagine, create and, most important, have fun together.
CRAZY CRAYONS
Heat makes a crayon a little loopy; it may melt into a swirl or pool into a whirl. With this in mind, we chopped up crayons and baked them in shaped mini-cake tins, making large blocks that are easy for toddlers to hold. They will surely inspire older artists.
Encourage kids to come up with combinations: A blue-and-white blend for drawing the sky, for example, and a mix of reds and oranges for sunsets.
CRAYON HOW-TO: You will need a kitchen knife, old crayons and a mini-cake tin. Parents can use a knife to chop crayons into pea-size pieces, taking care to keep colors separate so kids can combine them as they like.
Preheat the oven to 150 degrees while children fill the tin with crayon pieces, arranging them in interesting designs. Bake for 15 minutes to 20 minutes, or just until the waxes have melted.
Remove the shapes after they have cooled. If they won’t come out, place the tray in the freezer for an hour, and the crayons will pop out.
SANDWICH PUZZLE
To a picky eater, a sandwich might seem rather ho-hum, but an edible puzzle is another story entirely.
Soft fillings such as cream cheese and tuna salad are the easiest to cut for these types of sandwiches.
Make the sandwich, and use a cookie cutter to slice a shape through the center. Then cut the surrounding puzzle pieces with a kitchen knife. Scramble the pieces before serving the sandwich.
APPLE PRINTS
When you eat an apple, you’ve just devoured a wonderful paint-stamping tool.
Half an apple, dipped in candy-colored paint, can be stamped on all kinds of things: lunch bags, canvas totes, notebook covers. Draw in details such as stems and leaves with fabric markers.
APPLE PRINT HOW-TO: You will need apples; black and green fabric markers; a medium-size paintbrush; bright-colored acrylic paints;and an object to stamp on, such as a canvas tote, a paper lunch bag or a sheet of paper.
Cut an apple in half from top to bottom. Use a paintbrush to apply the paints evenly over the cut side of the apple. Then stamp on the surface of your object.
The more the apple is used for stamping, the less vivid the print will be, so be sure to reapply paint, or use the other half (perhaps with a different color).
Use black or green markers, or paint if desired, to draw stems and leaves.