CreatifulKids | Creative Activities for Kids and Positive Parenting Tips for Growing Creative and Beautiful Kids

How to Make an Indoor Slide for Kids

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Angela

This indoor slide for kids might come in handy one day when you’re stuck at home with energetic kids.

It was in the early afternoon and outside it was already getting dark. Some heavy rain was coming our way and I was in the house with my 3 kids. The initial plan was to get out in the park but obviously that was not an option any more. I tried to invite them to do some painting, cutting or some other crafts project – but NO, they wanted something active. So they came up with some ideas of their own:

“We can jump on you!”
“You can be the monster and try to catch us!”
“We can jump from one bed to the other and you catch us so we don’t get hurt!”
….

At this point I started to fear that I wouldn’t make it through the day. That’s when the indoor slide idea came to my mind. Desperate times call for desperate measures!

I took a mattress from their bed, put it as a slide on my bed, and invited them to try out our new indoor slide. Gosh they had fun with it!

They helped each other get on the indoor slide, they took turns, and also took some breaks from time to time, as the exercise was very intense.

My only task was to re-build the indoor slide and put the mattress back on the bed every time it got on the floor.

They played more than one hour on this indoor slope and this clearly exhausted them. But even then, we could only stop after I promised that we’ll play like this again the next day.

So if you ask them what is their favorite activity in the house, I bet that they’ll say “the indoor slide for kids!”.

How to Make a Cardboard Sword for Kids

Posted on April 15, 2014 by Angela

Making a cardboard sword proved to be a “must do too” after we finished our knight shield. Luckily a cardboard sword is easy enough to make.

This is what you need to make a cardboard sword for kids:

Hard Cardboard (look for some really strong cardboard big enough to fit the full sword)
Pencil/drawing tool
Utility knife
Masking tape
Silver tape
Paint, brushes and craft gems or other decorating materials

This is how we made our cardboard sword for kids:

We first decided on the shape of our cardboard sword: I had in mind something more similar to this sword (from Red Ted Art) but my kids decided that that’s not the kind of cardboard sword they wanted. Bummer! So I asked them to show me what they want, and for like 30 min they took turns in drawing their dream sword and explaining me what they wanted. Once that was settled we started the “real work”.

I made a sword template and started with the cutting of the cardboard sword: As for our shield, I made a template out of paper and then used it as a tracing pattern for drawing the sword on the cardboard. For our cardboard sword, I cut 2 sword shapes from cardboard and layere them into one cardboard sword to give it more strength. I also cut 2 more pieces of cardboard for the handle of the sword (the green colored part of our sword), and connect them to the sword to the to give it a 3D look.

The next step was to tape all of these pieces of cardboard together. I choose not to use paper mâché (because I found it too messy) and used instead paper tape. I wrapped the whole cardboard sword in paper tape. So at the end I had a nice looking and strong sword, but it looked quite unattractive. So Lukas decided to take a black pen and color it, but then we had a better idea: to use silver tape. I put silver tape on the blade of our cardboard sword and it already looked like we’re going somewhere 🙂

I put another layer of paper tape on the handle of the cardboard sword (as we wanted to paint and decorate it. Then I asked my little knight what colors he wanted to use to paint his cardboard sword. If you saw our green knight shield, you won’t be surprised by his choice:-)

Once the paint was dried, I took out the “precious stones” and the decorating began. Soon after we had a nice set: A cardboard sword and a cardboard shield that the kids could use to chase their imaginary dragons.

If you liked this sword but you’re looking for other kind of crafts with cardboard (more girlish) have a look at these easy to make cardboard fairy wings that all 3 of my kids still enjoy playing with, even if it’s almost a year since they made them.

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged activities for children, Cardboard boxes, castle crafts, craft ideas, crafts for kids, crafts with cardboard | Comments Off

Egg Art for Kids- Painting with Egg Yolk

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Angela

If you’re looking for new art ideas, then try this egg art for kids and paint with egg yolk.

First, let’s tackle the obvious question: Why on earth would you choose to paint with egg yolk? It sounds weird. True, but it’s also different, creative, long lasting … and you might just happen to have broken or old eggs in the house which are no longer good for consumption. That’s exactly what happened to me. And although my husband was reluctant, painting with egg yolk seemed a better idea than simply throwing the eggs away.

In fact, some days ago my youngest was checking out the fridge and demolishing half of it on her way in. Some days later I realized 2 eggs in the carton box were broken and I suspected they had been there broken in the box for some days. So I didn’t trust to use them as food anymore. Instead of throwing them away, I thought of an egg art for kids, and invited my little artists to paint with the yolk of my broken eggs.

But there’s more to say for it than just having some broken eggs. There are some interesting differences between painting with egg yolk and the “normal” painting techniques:

With egg yolk the colors stay vibrant and shiny, making your painting look smooth and shiny and giving similar results as when paint with oil based colors.
The paint is thicker than normal paint and dries very fast. To avoid ‘cracks’ in your painting, I suggest you use a stiff material to paint on (cardboard, wood or glass rather than plain paper)
I’m not sure you care about this, but egg yolk makes your paint longer lasting. So much that some past and present painters make their own paint using egg yolk and build societies around that.
In the kids version (combining egg yolk with washable paint), the egg paint is water-resistant, but not waterproof. So the painting will be ‘safer’, but you can still wash off any stains from your kids clothes or the table-cloth 🙂

A side note for doing egg art for kids: The “real artists” who paint with egg separate the yolk and white of the egg. However if you do this with the kids, you can use the whole egg content (yolk and white). Just mix mix the yolk and white together, like you’d do for an omelet. The colors of the painting will continue to be vibrant and shiny, but the paint itself will have a slightly different texture than if you’d paint only with egg yolk.

On this close-up picture you see the vibrant, shiny colors even though the paint is completely dried

What you need for this egg art for kids:

one egg yolk (we used two because we had two broken eggs, but one would have been more than enough)
liquid watercolors or poster paint or other washable liquid paint
brushes (you need one separate brush for the yolk and some other brushes for the colors)
containers for the colors and the egg yolk
a palette for mixing the colors (or you can substitute it -as we did- with a white box)
something “stiff” to paint on (we used a thick sheet of paper, but it was not such a good idea. You’ll see later on why)

The technique is simple: When painting, you substitute the water with egg yolk. That’s all 🙂

This is how we did our egg art for kids:
First, my 3 artists (age 6, 4 and 2) decided what they wanted to paint and made their drawings on a sheet of paper. Victoria chose to make a scene with chickens, eggs, stars and other details while Lukas and Elena did their best to draw Easter eggs.

Then, once the drawings were done, I explained that we will use eggs instead of water. I could see the “what?” on their faces. What they had to do is to take some egg yolk from the egg container and put it on their “palette” (in our case a white box). Then with another brush, take the color (or colors) and mix them with the egg on the palette, and paint with that. The only time we’d use water was to wash the brushes so that they could paint with another color.

Finally they painted and painted, and in the process learned a couple of things!

Victoria (6 years old) learned a couple of painting techniques: how to paint using only the tip of the brush rather than the whole brush – that’s how she made the grass and the flowers. She also learned how to recycle the paint from the end of the brush back to the top of the brush (by twisting the brush against a hard surface).

As a result we have a nice farm scene with the cock and hen looking at their chickens that are getting out of their eggs. And all of this in the night while other hens are sleeping.

Lukas (4 years old) enjoyed experimenting. He started his painting adventure by examining a real egg, and then experimenting with how different painting with egg is compared to well … normal painting. Soon he decided that painting with egg is so much more fun. It’s shiny and yellow … according to him it makes no sense to even use other colors! So before I could react, he took his pot of egg yolk and poured the whole content over his sheet of paper. Then he just painted with that, and the result was a yellow and shiny Easter egg painting.

Elena (2 years old), just held on to her painting pot and enjoyed mixing colors and tracing shapes. She had fun and it was a good exercise for her fine motor skills. With or without egg yolk, painting made no difference for her. But that’s ok, because for her age painting is all about mixing colors and getting dirty 🙂

I was telling you that making this painting on paper might not be the best thing to do, most of all if you want to preserve and display the little pieces of art. If you use a sheet of paper or canvas and your kids are generous with their egg usage (like Lukas was) you’ll very soon get cracks in the “painting”. That’s because the egg paint is not a flexible paint and the paper is not stiff enough. So if you want to have something more long lasting, then paint on something that does stiffer like wood for example.

As a proud mother, I’ll of course put these masterpieces on the wall.

Just a thought: if you’re doing blown up egg crafts with kids for Easter, besides making an omelet, you can also use the yolk and white of the egg to do some egg art for kids 😉

I hope you enjoyed our egg art for kids as much as we did!. If you paint with eggs and have pictures to share, I’l be curious to see them on the creatifulkids facebook page.

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged activities for children, colorful play, coloring and drawing, craft ideas, crafts for kids, Creative play, Easter activities, easter crafts for kids, egg, food coloring, painting | 1 Comment

4 Easter Activities for Kids – With Plastic Easter Eggs

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Angela

With Easter coming soon, I thought it’s time to do some Easter activities for kids … so we played with plastic eggs.

To be honest with you, I planned to do only one activity, but my kids decided to experiment and play a bit more, so we ended up doing 4 Easter activities for kids instead of just one.

These are the things we did:

Alphabet Easter Egg Hunt
A game for 4-6 year old kids to learn the alphabet, recognize letters and learn how to trace them.

Color and Shape Matching
A game for 2-4 year old kids to learn the colors and find similarities and practice sorting in general.

Combining Colors
A discovery game for 2-4 year old kids to learn the colors in a playful way and discover in a non messy way what happens when you combine colors.

Tower Building
A game for 2-6 year old kids to practice the fine motorics while building towers which also encourages them to think out of the box.

What you need for these Easter activities for kids:

A pack of plastic eggs like such as these (the size of the eggs is not that important)
A permanent marker
A sheet of paper with the alphabet written on it.

As preparation I wrote on each half egg the big and small letters of the alphabet (one letter group per egg) and then separated them.

Next I wrote the alphabet (small and big letters) on a piece of paper. This actually proved to be a challenge for me because towards the end I noticed that I forgot some of the letters. So the order of my alphabet is not quite right …. but I made sure that all letters are there, and in the end that’s the most important ;-).

Also, don’t worry if you have fewer eggs than the letters of the alphabet. I had the same issue, but you can read below what I handled it;-)

This is how we played our alphabet Easter egg hunt:
Lukas is 4 and does not yet know the letters. He had the task to “hunt for the big letters” and match them with the ones on the sheet of paper. Once he found them, he circled them and tried to trace them on the paper.

Victoria is 6 and she knows most of the letters but cannot write all of them just yet. Her task was to find and match the small letters with the big letters that Lukas found. And then, with the “help ” of Elena (2 years), she re-assembled the matching half eggs to form an egg.

In our case, not all letters on the page had matching eggs (I had fewer eggs than the number of letters). So we adjusted the game and I challenged them to find out which were the letters that had no matching eggs.

They actually did not fully finish the game because Elena decided to do some color sorting, and Lukas started experimenting with light, so we moved to the next activity.

The plastic eggs come in different colors, so one of the Easter activities for kids that you can do is to invite the kids to sort the eggs (or half eggs) by color and/or by shape (the upper half of an egg has a different shape than the lower one).

I started playing this with Elena (to exercise her color vocabulary) but in all honesty this game also did not last too long. That’s because Lukas decided to try something else, which got everybody super excited, so we all moved to the next Easter activity for kids.

Like I said before, Lukas decided to try something new with the plastic eggs. He figured out that he could put half of and egg in front of his eye, and he’d look like a pirate!

Of course the color matching we did before was not as much fun as this new discovery, so everybody joined him.

Then he started adding more layers and noticed how the colors he was seeing were mixing resulting in different colors all together.

The plastic eggs are a bit transparent. So if you layer them in front of the eye and look towards the window or another source of light, you see the different colors and the combination effect.

This is a to difficult game for a 2 year old and Elena did not really get the concept of looking through the eggs. But she did her best to join the fun, which is also kind of sweet 🙂

Once Lukas had enough of this, I noticed he started stacking the half eggs into a tower. And that’s how we moved to the next Easter activity for kids.

The task was simple, to make towers by putting half eggs one on top of the other. Then we thought of making 2 different towers: one tower by using only the upper half, and another one just the lower half. We wanted to see which tower is higher.

The kids soon noticed that stacking the upper half is relatively easy, while making a tower from the lower half of the plastic eggs is quite a challenge. This challenge got Victoria thinking … so her solution was to give the tower a point of support. That of course after trying out some different hypothesis 🙂

And once the towers are made, just watch the kids to see what else they come up with. In our case, Lukas decided to go the extra mile and this is the result: a bent tower 🙂

Yeah … we did all these different Easter activities for kids in one afternoon because short attention spans require more variation 🙂 However besides the first Easter activity for kids which I prepared in advance , I had nothing else planned and just followed the kids’s lead. And we had a great time!

A small bonus, in case you’re looking for more Easter activities for kids that involve plastic eggs I have a pinterest board with over 30 Easter activities for kids to inspire you (and me) and check also this egg creative challenge project with lots of other Easter activities for kids that turn around eggs.

Are you doing any Easter activities for kids involving plastic eggs? If so, do share! I’m always interested to hear what others are doing.

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Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged activities for children, Creative play, Easter activities, easter crafts for kids, kids game, spring crafts for kids | 2 Comments

Birthday Party Invitations Made by Kids

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Angela

When Victoria’s 6th birthday got closer I crafted these fairy birthday party invitations with her. They might not look like it, but they’re quite easy to do. In fact Victoria did most of them by herself.

It’s that time of the year when the birthday of your kid is getting closer and it’s time to prepare the birthday party invitations, the birthday countdown and the birthday party. I guess this is becoming a tradition in our house. You can have a look at these other easy to make birthday party invitations that we did last year.

I like to involve the kids as much as possible in the preparations. So this time, I wanted to do some fairy birthday party invitations that Victoria could do herself. That implies that they need to be easy to make and look nice enough for her to be proud to give them to her friends.

What we used for our birthday party invitations:

lace paper
glue
scissors
colored paper
something to draw, like a pen or pencil
decorating material (glitter glue, stickers….)

This is how to make these fairy birthday party invitations:

I cut the colored paper into the right shape. I made them approximately into what I considered to be the right size for the birthday party invitations (more or less 1/4 of an A4 paper).

I then cut the dresses, faces and crown from the lace paper. If you do this, you need to be a bit inventive here, as the shape of the dress and crown depend a lot on the lace paper you have. You can also leave your child cut the lace paper, but in our case Victoria was not interested in cutting, she just wanted to glue and draw. So I did the cutting 🙂

Next, I made a fairy card as example. I glued the crown, face and dress on the colored paper and drew the hands, face, hair … Victoria just watched me. I made this first card just to show her an example as to what she could do. I also made some different faces and haircuts on some other sheets of paper, so that Victoria could use them as inspiration. It was however up to her if she wanted to do this or something else. She chose to follow.

The next step is the easiest of all: I just gave her the space to make her own birthday party invitations.

The only thing left to do was to print all the details of the party on a paper, cut them out and glue them on the back side of the birthday party invitations.

As an extra, we also glued our self made butterflies to the back, to make it even more fairy like 🙂

And of course we can’t make a printable without sharing it.
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These birthday party invitations are very easy to do and even if you’re not planning any party, making these fairies is a really fun craft for kids.

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Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged birthday party, craft ideas, crafts for kids, fairy crafts, free printable, free printables, free printables for kids, girls crafts, princess | 4 Comments

How to Make a Knight Shield out of Cardboard

Posted on March 21, 2014 by Angela

You’ll know it’s time to make a knight shield or a sword when your kids start chasing each other through the house screaming and waving whatever strange looking stick they could call a sword.

So I decided it’s time for us to make a knight shield.

And I guess if this noisy fun continues we’ll also make a cardboard sword later 🙂

This is what we used to make this knight shield out of cardboard.

One or two pieces of strong cardboard
A piece of string/rope for the handle
Pen
Utility knife
Optional – silver tape, paint, glue, craft gemstones, colored paper for decoration

Did you notice how many types of knight shields there are out there? You find them round, oval, rectangular, as a triangle … basically lots of shapes and sizes! I didn’t want to get into trouble with the kids because of making the “wrong knight shield”. So I asked the council.

Lukas and Victoria had a small talk, and came back to me with a drawing that looked more or less like the picture below. I then made a template shield from a big piece of paper, they approved it and so we got to work.

Tip: If you want your knight shield to be symmetric, then fold your template paper in 2 and draw half of the shield starting from the fold. Once you cut and unfold the paper, you’ll get a symmetrical knight shield template.

Using the paper template, I traced the shape of the knight shield on one of the pieces of cardboard, and cut the first knight shield shape out.

Tip: If your cardboard is not strong enough, then cut more shields and stick them together (like we did). I use two pieces of cardboard for this knight shield.

For the second shield shape, Victoria traced the shape using the first cardboard knight shield we made. As you can imagine Victoria loved it. I even let her experience cutting with the utility knife, but only for a while as she is not strong enough to cut through the cardboard. And at her age the utility knife is more of a hazard to her than anything else.

Then my 2 eager young artists started with the painting of the knight shields. Lukas got to choose the color … can you guess what his favorite color is? My little 2 year old decided to make a small mess since apparently it’s so much more fun to paint with the fingers than with the brush 🙂

After the paint dried, we started making the knight shield handle. I used a ribbon that Lukas slid through 2 holes and then stapled to make a closed loop. As stapling is so much fun, he stapled a lot … you know, to make sure it won’t open 😉

So we got ourselves 2 painted knight shields out of which one had a cool handle.

Next, using a silver tape, I taped the 2 knight shields together. The kids and myself took turns in holding the knight shield pieces and taping them together.

At the end the kids glued on the middle of the shield a red spade that I cut out of paper, and Lukas was already happy with it.

But the next day he decided to glue some gemstones to it.

That’s it; the knight shield is ready!

The kids were satisfied. that’s until Victoria asked….
“But mommy, where is the sword? How can we fight the bad guys without a sword?”

Yeah … she has a point, so I guess we’ll have to make a sword to go with this shield. But that’s going to be for another time.

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged activities for children, Cardboard boxes, castle crafts, craft ideas, crafts for kids, crafts with cardboard | Comments Off

Make your own Fairy Flower Crowns

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Angela

Making fairy flower crowns for kids is easier than you’d think. Have a look at what we’ve done!

With my girl in a “fairy phase” and some freshly made paper flowers, what were we to do? Some fairy flower crowns of course! We actually did only one fairy flower crown for now but the idea is to do more on Victoria’s 6th birthday – as a craft session with her friends.

So, we took our paper flowers out and got to business. If you’re not sure how to make paper flowers, check out this tutorial.

This is what you need to make fairy flower crowns:

A sheet of colored paper
A stapler
Optional a foam sheet and elastic – if you’re aiming for long lasting flower crowns

How to make fairy flower crowns
Cut two stripes, about 2-3 cm wide, from your colored paper and glue the paper flowers on one of them. You can have your kid cut the stripes and glue the flowers. The more flowers, the nicer the flower crown will be. Just make sure you leave some space at the beginning and the end of the paper stripe as you’ll need it later to finish the fairy flower crowns.

Now that this masterpiece is done, you should have one long piece of paper with many colorful flowers glued on it. The next step is to connect it to the other stripe of paper and make a circle big enough to fit on your kid’s head …just like a crown would. And that’s it! Your own fairy flower crown is ready!

If you want to go the extra mile …
Now if you want to go a small step further and you have some foam sheets available, you can make the fairy flower crowns a bit more robust. I went for that and decided to use a foam sheet and a small elastic.

After gluing the paper flowers to the stripe of colored paper, I made a crown from a long and narrow piece of foam sheet and a small piece of elastic (the piece of foam sheet should be at least as big as the paper stripe with flowers). I then stapled the stripe of paper with flowers to the foam sheet. And that’s it, the flower crown is ready!

A you can see, Victoria was not the only one who was excited with her paper flower crown. Elena was also happy to try it out 🙂

This is a super easy crafts activity and looks so pretty! On top, flower crowns like these fit really well with these cardboard fairy wings we did a while ago!

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged activities for children, birthday party, craft ideas, crafts for kids, girls crafts, paper crafts, princess | 1 Comment

How to make Paper Flowers for Kids

Posted on March 13, 2014 by Angela

Teach your kids how to make paper flowers. An easy and no mess creative activity for kids.

You might think it’s spring or my daughters love for fairies and princesses that inspired us to make paper flowers. But no … it was my 4 year old boy who just wanted to cut something. So I asked him if he’d like to learn how to make paper flowers – and I made sure to tell him that he’s going to do lots of cutting – so he was convinced 🙂

Materials you need to make paper flowers for kids:

paper
scissors
something to write (this is optional if you do this craft activity with older kids)
glue or stapler

Here are the step by step instructions on how to make paper flowers for kids:

Draw a circle on the paper. It doesn’t have to be a perfect circle and the size doesn’t really matter either. I drew one more or less the size of my hand. Obviously the bigger the circle the bigger the flower.

Draw a spiral inside the circle (starting from outside towards the center). Going twice or 3 times around is enough, but you can go around as many times as you want.

Get the scissors and cut (more or less) along the spiral line – don’t worry if your kid does not cut along the lines. It doesn’t look yet like paper flower, but just wait.

Starting from the outer side of the spiral, roll it towards the center. Motivate your kids to roll the paper as tight as they can.

When there is almost nothing more to roll, put a decent amount of glue on the end of the spiral (which is the center of your circle) and press the “bottom” of the rolled spiral on the glue.

Next thing to do, let the paper flower free and watch it unfold.

Tips for making paper flowers for kids:

Instead of glue, you can use a stapler in which case- after step 6- you need to staple the beginning of your spiral (which is now the center of your flower) with the end of your spiral (where you would normally put the glue).
The weight of the paper is not important, but as a rule of thumb, the younger the kids, the thicker the paper and the bigger the flower you should make. You can even use the inner side of a paper plate if you do this with small kids. This way it is easier for them to handle the paper.

Regardless of the age of your kids, this is a nice creative activity because it really puts the fine motor skills of the kids to the test:

The kids get to practice fine cutting as they need to cut the paper flowers spiral by – approximately – following a line.
And they also exercise fine finger movements and coordination as they need to roll the paper.

Once you have a bunch of paper flowers, you can start thinking of other creative activities for kids where you can use your freshly made paper flowers.

We put our flowers aside, and some time later Victoria made a fairy paper flower crown.

PS: If you’re looking for other kind of paper flowers, I found this easy tutorial for making large tissue flowers that you might find useful also.

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged activities for children, craft ideas, crafts for kids, fairy crafts, flower crafts for kids, girls crafts, paper crafts, spring crafts for kids | Comments Off

Indoor Activities for Kids: Princess from Corn Starch Building Blocks

Posted on March 7, 2014 by Angela

Easy and fun indoor activities for kids always come in handy when at home with a sick kid. So on a ‘sick leave’ occasion I got the corn starch building blocks out and we had some fun.

It’s not the first time we integrated the corn starch building blocks into our creative play and I knew that Victoria loves them. So I took out our corn starch building blocks and tools and got to business.

I told Victoria I wanted to make a princess and asked her if she’d like to help. “I’ll just watch you do it” was the reply of my little sick girl – my poor little one had fever – but she did grab a small chair to join me at the play table. That was not the answer I was fishing for as I was hoping to have some time to get some chores done… But OK… I went with the flow and started with the princess’ dress.

Before jumping into this activity, if you want to know more about these corn starch thingies – if you haven’t played with them before – I have a small explanation at the end of the post.

We used for this princess craft:

Corn starch building blocks
Special cutting knife (that came together with the box we bought)
Wet sponge or towel

We cut the corn starch building blocks to make them thinner, pressed them on the wet towel and then stuck them against each other to make a circle, which would be the bottom of the dress. Then we continued doing the same and building the dress upwards and making it a bit narrower as we got higher…

Actually, Victoria could build the dress by herself, but I did most of the work as my sick kid was not really in the mood. Instead she got busy preparing the ornaments and stuck them on the dress. That was fine too. Although it did not give me the free time I was hoping for, decorating the dress was the starting point to have Victoria forget about her fever for a while.

When the dress was done I asked her: “What now?”. “Let’s build the rest of it” she said. Great, finally she was joining in! Then we added the body, shoulders and head.

I peeled a spiral out of a brown starch building block and Victoria glued it to the head as we started with the hair.

Then Victoria rolled some of the starch building blocks between her fingers to make the eyes, nose and mouth, and I fiddled with the crown.

Now the only thing left was for Victoria to add the arms and our princess was ready. And it brought a smile on my sick little girls’ face – which at the end of the day is more important than the free time I was hoping to get out of this activity. We actually made this princess a while ago (when Victoria was 4 – shame on me that it took more than one year to post this!)

This is one of those great indoor activities for kids, and if you try it, I bet you’ll going to want to play again and again with corn starch building blocks! We did a princess….but with a bit of imagination the sky is the limit as to what you can do with these things 🙂

Corn starch building blocks: We have been playing with cornstarch building blocks since the kids are 2 years old. Although the recommendation on the box is 3+, smaller kids can also play with them under supervision. As they are made out of corn starch, the blocks are safe (even if kids put them in their mouth) and 100% biodegradable. There are different brands selling this: Magic Nuudles (in US), FisherTip (in Europe) and if you want more info, check this video (you can even download templates and get some extra inspiration). All in all I think it’s a great thing to have in the house when you want to do creative indoor activities for kids

To wrap up: If you’re looking for some fun, creative and no mess indoor activities for kids, then playing with corn starch building blocks might just save your day just like it saved mine! This is one of the easiest crafty indoor activities for kids ever and it stimulates their imagination and creativity.

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged activities for children, colorful play, craft ideas, crafts for kids, Creative play, favorite toy, princess, Toy favourite | 1 Comment

3 Positive Parenting Tips for Dealing with Energetic Kids

Posted on February 28, 2014 by Angela

Before having children I thought that being a mother is the most rewarding job in the world, that your kids love and listen to you unconditionally and they bring peace and joy in the house.

6 years and 3 kids later, I realize how ignorant I’ve been.

Sometimes I think that my kid’s secret mission in life is to make sure me and my husband get constantly trained in conflict management and creative problem solving. I don’t yet feel I master this positive parenting tips business completely right, but over the past years, I developed some ways of keeping the situation under control. Below are 3 of the tactics most used in our house.

Give them a warning ahead: These kids are busy, play is a serious business for them. My kids would come home and tell me with a straight face: “I’m so tired, I had to play so much today!” So when I want them to follow my agenda, it doesn’t always work. To avoid me running late everywhere because I have to wait for them to finish their stuff, I took the habit to give them an advance warning. I often feel that we as parents expect too often for our kids to drop things on the spot when we ask them. Instead I tell my kids 5 to 10 minutes ahead that we need to leave (or eat, sleep, …) so they have the time to finish up whatever they are doing at that moment.

Teach them patience: Kids often want the same toys at the same time. Often you as an adult only notice when it’s too late. By then it’s impossible to say who had the toy first. Rather than taking the toy away or putting one child ahead of the other, I prefer to go for a compromise where they both get to play in turns. To do so, I use what I call my “count to 30” technique. I’m using this technique now for more than 2 years and for us this works every time.

Leaving them space: I got to accept that my kids are wild and that they need to get rid of their energy in some way. I don’t want them to feel that it’s wrong, rather I look for ways to give them the space and the place to be themselves. This can be in different ways, such as letting them go and shout as loud as they want in the garage (or another space where they don’t disturb anyone), making a corridor in the living room so they can run, sitting down with them from time to time and let them climb all over me, …

This is just a grasp of how I try to raise my energetic kids in the best way and let them grow as the beautiful persons they are. Love and acceptance bring you a long way, but some little positive parenting tips and tricks can help a lot as well 🙂

Do you have any good techniques you use with your kids? I’m definitely interested!

Posted in Parenting | Tagged Conflict solving, Parenting tips, Patience with children, positive parenting tips | 1 Comment