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

How to Make Egg Carton Flowers – Easy Egg Carton Crafts

Posted on February 5, 2014 by Angela

For a while now I’m piling up egg carton boxes, planning to do lots of great egg carton crafts, but never finding the time to do so. So when Victoria wanted to make some flowers, it was a perfect occasion to use my “stock” and make some egg carton flowers with the kids.

I overheard Victoria saying to a friend of hers: “My mommy likes to do crafts” … as an explanation to why the cupboard was full of weird-looking pieces of painted egg carton getting dried. I guess she is right. Sometimes I get carried away and our living room – which is where we do most of the crafts – looks a bit like out of this world. Luckily I have an understanding husband who puts up with my crafty, arty and sometimes messy ideas. But OK…let’s get back to the task at hand: the egg carton flowers.

What you need to make egg carton flowers:

Some egg carton boxes; the more boxes, the more egg carton flowers you can make (duh!)
Scissors or utility knife
A bunch of pipe cleaners (for the stalks)
Optional for decoration – paint & brushes, glitter and if you want to get wild you can also add some scented essence to the paint and have some flowers that actually smell 🙂

First, using the utility knife I cut out the flower shape from the egg carton boxes and then made a whole in the middle to make space for the stalks (pipe cleaners). Then I slide the pipe cleaners through the hole in the middle and our flowers were ready.

Side note: The egg carton boxes come in different shapes and sizes, and depending on the kind you have you might need to tweak a bit the process of making your egg carton flowers.

So far Victoria was only partially happy with her flowers. I did do all the cutting myself and she only had to add the pipe cleaners – which I guess was not engaging enough for her. So she decided that her egg carton flowers need some color and glitter. So we took out our glitter, paint and brushes and got to business.

As soon as Victoria started to paint, Lukas announced that he’d like to join the painting party.

… and Elena of course would not have it that she’s the only one to miss the fun, so she also joined.

And when Lukas decided to take a break I took the opportunity to also join the painting party.

Towards the end it did get a bit messy with all 3 kids splashing around with their brushes (and fingers) full with paint, but it was fun!

And the result looked good, even if the egg carton flowers took some hours to dry in the living room – which got Victoria to make the “My mommy likes to do crafts” comment towards her friend.

This was fun, so we will definitely do some more egg carton crafts in the future!

This post was also shared on Kidsinthkitchen and Small Footprint Family

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 carton crafts for kids, painting, spring crafts for kids | 2 Comments

We wish you a happy and creative 2014!

Posted on December 31, 2013 by Angela

We wish you all the best for a creative, playful 2014!

New Year is typically the time that you make new resolutions. My resolution for 2014 is that I’d like to learn more on making videos and using some of my video work on this blog. What do you think of my first trial?

Happy New Year and I wish you a 2014 full of fun and creative crafts with your kids!

Posted in Parenting | Tagged kids music, positive parenting tips, singing kids | 1 Comment

How to Make a Birthday Party Countdown Train

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Angela

This is how I made the train birthday party countdown for my son which proved to be quite educational for the kids and also a lot of fun for the whole family.

I wrote before why a birthday party countdown is good for the kids. Now if I have you convinced to do one also, have a look how I did the train birthday party countdown for Lukas.

What you need for a train birthday party countdown

A printed train engine drawing, or alternatively you can draw one of your own
Some envelopes (as many as the number of days left till the event you have in mind)
Some sheets of colored paper (black for the wheels and blue for the windows)
Scissors, glue and paper tape

This is how you build a train birthday party countdown

For the engine, I found a train engine to print on this website. I would have liked for Lukas to color his own train engine, but the birthday countdown was meant to be a surprise so I ended up doing that myself 🙂

For the wagon connections, I used a piece of ribbon that I taped to the wall using masking tape. I used the same masking tape to stick all the wagons and the engine to the wall, so that they can be easily removed without any damage to the wall.

For the wagons, I used 10 envelopes – there were 10 days left until Lukas’ birthday – and I cut out 20 circles from black paper for the wheels. Then for the windows I used rectangles cut out from blue paper. On each rectangle I wrote a number from 1 to 10 to show the number of days left till his birthday.

For the “daily surprise” I put in each envelope a surprise activity as well as 3 small candies and 3 stickers (so that Lukas would share them with his 2 sisters). I then put everything together on the wall in the living room, high enough so the kids couldn’t reach it by themselves. I first taped the ribbon and then the engine and the wagons on top of it.

The activities were each time small things that Lukas likes and that we’d do together during the day. For each activity I would make a small drawing and write down the activity on a small paper. And so we had ice cream, played with lights in the dark, had some friends sleep over, made some creative activities and had fun with lots of things that my son loves.

For the 10 days that it lasted, the kids have been getting up enthusiastic every morning, excited to take a wagon down, open it and discover the surprises inside. As for the parents, we had no more “how much time till my birthday” kind of questions. So we all loved our train birthday party countdown! 🙂

As you might have read in my previous post on why to make a birthday countdown, Victoria is already expecting to have a countdown of her own for her birthday. Just that she prefers fairies over trains … so if you have ideas of how I could make a fairy birthday countdown, I’ll be super happy to get some inspiration.

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged activities for children, birthday countdown, birthday party, craft ideas, crafts for kids, paper crafts, Parenting tips, positive parenting tips | 5 Comments

Why to Make a Birthday Countdown for your Kids

Posted on December 10, 2013 by Angela

To help my son visualize his 4th birthday approaching, I made a train birthday countdown for him, which turned out quite nice and useful 🙂

I honestly didn’t see the point of having a birthday countdown till I had preschoolers in the house. Once you have small kids, you notice how it is harder and harder for them to stay patient the closer they get to their birthday.

For some weeks already Lukas is super enthusiastic and eager to get to the “big day”. Every day – sometimes even a couple of times a day – he would be asking me how many more times he has to sleep till his birthday. I can tell you that after 3 days I kind of had enough of this “game”.

But my little guy was genuinely interested and eager to find out how long he still had to wait. So I decided to make a birthday countdown for him. This way it would be easier for him to visualize the passing of time – and hopefully give me a break on the daily questions. He loves trains and I tried to make something fun and exciting for him, so I made him a train birthday countdown.

You should have seen Lukas’ enthusiasm after school when he came home and discovered his birthday countdown train. He got to open a wagon every day in the morning up to his birthday, so every day the train was getting shorter and shorter. This helped him to understand the passing of time and anticipate the arrival of his birthday.

His birthday was 10 days away, so our birthday countdown train had 10 wagons. He couldn’t wait to start taking the wagons off the wall and opening them – because in each wagon of the birthday countdown train there was a surprise waiting for him.

This train birthday countdown proved to be quite educative because it didn’t only help the kids to better grasp the notion of time but it gave us the opportunity to :

Practice math by counting the number of days left till the birthday and discussing daily about it. We would also do some adding and subtraction of the days and make predictions for the number of days left from tomorrow onward…and so on.
Practice sharing with other kids. Although the train was for Lukas’ birthday and had a surprise activity for him, I would make sure every envelope had some candy and stickers to be shared with his sisters.
Practice patience because we had to wait every day till the next morning to be able to pick another wagon with surprises.

I’ll explain in my next article how I made this train birthday party countdown and what surprises I put in each wagon.

This was fun to make and fun to have in the house, so chances are we’ll do another birthday countdown again next year. In fact Victoria already started planning her next birthday party and one of the points on the birthday agenda is a fairy birthday count down. ~~No idea how I’m going to pull that one, but I have some moths to think it over.~~

Update: We did the fairy birthday countdown for Victoria. Have a look at her reaction when she first saw it.

Posted in Craft and creativity, Parenting | Tagged activities for children, birthday countdown, birthday party, craft ideas, crafts for kids, paper crafts, Patience with children, positive parenting tips | Comments Off

How to Make a Paper Christmas Tree – Simple Christmas Crafts

Posted on November 28, 2013 by Angela

If you’re looking for some simple Christmas crafts for kids, have a look at this easy to make paper Christmas tree.

What you need to make a paper Christmas tree:

One A4 sheet of (colored) paper
A toilet paper roll
Scissors
Some decorating materials like glitter, glue, stickers…. (optional)

How to make a paper Christmas tree in 4 easy steps:

Fold the A4 paper over the long side in a zig-zag pattern (as if you’d make a fan out of it), some might refer to it as folding like an accordion. If you do this paper Christmas tree with kids younger than 6, you might need to do the folding for them. But it is still good to encourage them to try the folding themselves as this is great exercise for their fine motor skills.

I did this paper Christmas tree together with Victoria (5,5 years) and Lukas (4 years). I thought that Victoria managed the folding quite ok, but she still liked mine more so both kids preferred that I did the folding for each of their paper Christmas trees anyway.

Cut the toilet paper roll in 2 for the base of the paper Christmas tree.

Make 2 small cuts on the side of the toilet paper roll to allow the folded paper to slide through.

Fold the zig-zag paper in 2 and then slide it through the cuts of the toilet paper roll. And there you are, you have your paper Christmas tree. Now all you need to do is to decorate it if you want to. If not, that’s also fine, even with no or few decoration, your paper Christmas tree will still look good 🙂

I hope you like our easy-to-make paper Christmas tree. This is one of those simple Christmas crafts for kids that is ready almost as soon as you start making it 🙂 If you like this paper Christmas tree, have a look also at these other simple Christmas crafts for kids.

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged activities for children, christmas crafts, craft ideas, crafts for kids, crafts with toilet paper rolls, crafts with toilet rolls, ideas for craft activity with kids, paper crafts | 7 Comments

Creative Activity for Kids – Squiggle Drawing

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Angela

Are you looking for an easy no-preparation creative activity for your kids? Have you heard of squiggle drawing?

I like to challenge my kids to be creative and think out of the box, that’s why I often propose them creative challenges. Squiggle drawing is one of them.

All you need for a squiggle drawing is a sheet of paper, a pen or pencil and your imagination. I did this recently with my kids and it was SUPER fun.

This is how you do a squiggle drawing: Take some index cards, or just cut/tear a piece of A4 paper into 4 and you draw a random line or shape on each piece. Then hand one to your kid and challenge him to continue the drawing and make something meaningful out of it. This way you are asking your kids to think creatively and to expand upon a pre-existing image.

To make it more fun, I worked with 2 or more cards with the same squiggle drawing on it. The challenge was to draw something new or different on each paper, starting from the same starting squiggle.

For the first squiggle drawing we started from 2 ovals. This first time I joined in with Victoria to introduce her to the concept. I drew a boy – as you can see I’m not having the best drawing skills – while Victoria did some lady bird bugs sunbathing on the beach. She continued to add as well some beach towels, the sea, the sun and umbrellas.

After a while I dropped out of the game, and Victoria continued to make her squiggle drawings, which allowed me to have some time to do other stuff.

Starting from a tangled line, Victoria first drew a bush full of red apples with a boy hiding behind it. The drawing also contains a sun, a mushroom house, and the house of a mole with everything a mole would need to live in comfort ;-). On the right, the same tangled line is transformed into the smoke coming out of a mushroom house. This time she drew a night scene including a sky full of stars and a bright moon!

Then I gave her 2 cards with a curved line and starting from this she drew an old lady with a stick on one, and a butterfly on the other.

Here we started from another curved line and she did a girl, a railroad and a boy.

Lukas (almost 4) also joined this game, but ended up exercising his drawing skills by drawing his own car on a piece of paper. In my opinion squiggle drawing is a great creative activity for kids who have already some drawing skills, so probably as of 5 years and up.

I first read about squiggle drawing here, and thought that it is a great way to stimulate creative thinking for my kids. And apparently I’m not the only one 🙂 as the technique is frequently used by teachers and by child psychologists for communication with kids .

Obviously, now I am a fan of squiggle drawing with kids. If you think this might be fun for your kids also, try it out. I’ll be curious to hear from you how it was.

Update: Have a look at something else we did with curved lines. Cool right?

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged activities for children, coloring and drawing, Creative play, indoor activities for kids, kids game, travel with kids | Comments Off

Creative Activity for Kids – How to Make Wax Crayons

Posted on October 27, 2013 by Angela

If you have some leftovers of wax crayons and you’re looking for a way to recycle them, check out this creative activity for kids that shows you how to make wax crayons of different shapes and colors.

Don’t throw your leftover wax crayons, recycle them! They can be re-used in a creative activity for kids. I’ll explain in this post how to make wax crayons.

In our case, the reason why I decided to recycle our wax crayons was because I had the bad inspiration to leave them in the sun this summer. As a result we had a mass of wax crayons glued together and the kids could not play with them anymore. I was on the verge of throwing them away, when the recycling idea came to my mind. Below you can see what we did and read about our tips on how to make wax crayons.

What you need to make your own cool wax crayons:

Leftover pieces of wax crayons (preferably in different colors)
A knife, hammer or similar tool to cut/smash the crayons in very small pieces
A silicon oven tray
An oven heated at 150-180°C

How to make wax crayons – Our step by step instructions:

I used a knife to cut the leftover wax crayons into small pieces. You can also leave the the kids have the fun of smashing the crayons. For this you should put the wax crayons in a Ziploc bag and give them a hammer and a safe place to do the hammering.
We put the wax crayon pieces in a heart shaped silicon baking tray. You can use any shape you like, but I’d advice to use silicon trays as it will be easier to remove the newly made wax crayons.
I then put the tray in the oven and left it for 10-15 minutes until the wax was melted.
After this I put the tray with the melted wax in a cold place, outside on the pavement of my courtyard and out of the rain.

What are the kids learning from this creative activity of how to make wax crayons:

The kids learned about shapes and colors, specially about mixing colors, while we were discussing together and deciding together how we’d like the wax crayons to be
They also got an introduction to the physics of melting something at height temperature and solidifying it again at a low temperature

Before putting our new colorful crayons aside for a later coloring time, we also played a bit with them admiring the vibrant colors, counting them and making different shapes.

This is our version on how to make wax crayons. There are other techniques out there that show how to make wax crayons, but I believe that this is the least messy of all. If you want to do something else with wax crayons, you can also recycle them into wax candles.

Do you have other ideas on how to make wax crayons with kids in an easy and non-messy way?

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

Creative Challenge for Kids: Draw Something that does not Exist

Posted on September 16, 2013 by Angela

Help your kids to grow into creative adults. Give them creative challenges like asking them to draw something that does not exist.

It was one of those days when the kids were unable to play together without getting into a fight. Both Victoria (5) and Lukas (almost 4) were taking turns in requesting my attention and complaining about the other one. They needed a distraction! And drawing challenges are always fun!

My kids – as all kids I bet – love being challenged, and I like to stimulate their creativity. That’s why I decided to try something new and challenge them to be creative and think out of the box.

What you need for this creative activity for kids is:

A sheet of paper
Some crayons
A kid in need of a challenge 🙂

I put a blank sheet of paper in front of them and challenged them to draw something that does not exist.

At first they looked at me a bit strange….“But Mommy, how can we draw something that does not exist?”, they asked me. To make things easier for them we each took turns in giving example of things that do not exist like “a girl with her eyes in the tummy” or “a moon with legs”. Once they got the concept, Victoria and Lukas got excited and started their masterpieces.

They could use anything they wanted to make their drawing; they just had to draw something…anything as long as it was not real. So Lukas drew some colorful circles and Victoria just used a pen to make her imaginary drawing with lots of details.

The funny thing is that they were laughing so hard while drawing; and they were so vocal about the amazing things they did, that they got me tangled in their enthusiasm. I wanted to take advantage of the quiet time and do something else but I ended up just having a good laugh with them. So at the end of it all I didn’t do what I had planned to do but we definitely had some nice quality time, lots of laughter and some strange drawings.

I welcome you to admire:

The girl with legs on her head, arms instead of feet and eyes and ponytails everywhere,
The boy with long ears and piglet legs who is thinking of a girl
The train with legs, hearts and wheels all around
And some other non-existing stuff

Aren’t they great?

Do you give creative challenges to your kids? If you haven’t tried it before, do try it out and you’ll be amazed how fun this is. Let them draw something that does not exist. And if you did try things like this, please share your ideas and my kids will love you for it!

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged coloring and drawing, Creative play, kids game, positive parenting tips | Comments Off

Face painting for kids (and by kids)

Posted on September 2, 2013 by Angela

Are you into face painting? Personally I’m not a big fan. My kids though, they love it!

As a kid I might have still liked face painting, but this faded away as I grew older. Bottom line is that right now I’m not too motivated to start experimenting with face painting on my kids. But my kids love it. So what am I to do?

For one I can let grandma take charge. But this week I discovered – by chance – a whole new approach …

Convinced by the strong arguments of my kids (“We want YOU to paint our faces! Now!”) and after some awesome negotiation from my side (“OK but only once”), I did some face painting for kids the day before. And as I’m a very organized person, the face painting tools were still lying around the next day. I guess Victoria spotted them and had a plan ….

I got a bit suspicious the moment I realized that it had been quiet in the house already for a while. But I did not have to worry for too long. In no time I was attacked by a roaring tiger who apparently was in his turn chased by a raging butterfly. Lukas and Elena were chasing each other around the house and screaming their lungs out of joy. In the meantime Victoria (5 years) was also trying to get my attention to the fact that she did the face painting all by herself! And yeah, the quiet time was over.

What happened is that Victoria found the face painting tools and since she absolutely loves painting and drawing, she convinced her siblings to participate in a face painting exercise. And I think the result is great. Although the butterfly on Elena’s face makes her look a bit scary, I think that tiger Lukas looks awesome!

So the lessons learned today:

If there’s an activity my kids love they will to find a way to do it.
As long as there is no danger, I might as well embrace the fact that they’ll have a veto on the activity they like/want and I should try to make it as painless as possible for me. After all we do want to raise our kids to be their own self and not copycats of us.

As of today Victoria is my newly recruited face paint expert, who will be in charge of all the face painting jobs in our house. And you know what? She LOVES her new position!

Posted in Craft and creativity, Parenting | Tagged Creative play, face painting, painting, Parenting tips | Comments Off

Kids outdoor activity: Painting with chalk

Posted on August 24, 2013 by Angela

A quick and easy way to turn chalk into paint with your kids

On a hot summer day a while back Victoria had one of her friends over on a play-date.I thought it’s a nice opportunity to try out a new outdoor kids activity. We had done painting the walls before, but this time, I decided to make our own paint with the kids. And they loved it! We were all so much into the making paint thing, that I forgot to make pictures of it. Luckily I have some pictures of the result 🙂

A side note: This might seem complicated, but don’t worry, as a busy parent I go for the fast and easy option 🙂 I’m not going to explain some mind blowing way of making paint as I’m not into trying out difficult and time consuming stuff. What we did, took us virtually no time and it was super fun.

What you’ll need in order to make your own outdoor paint is:

lots of colorful chalk
something to crush the chalk (I used a mortar and pestle, but if you don’t have this, you can use a hammer and a plastic bag )
water
some painting brushes and small pots to store the liquid paint so the colors won’t mix

As a first, we crushed the chalk in the mortar until we got chalk powder. We kept the chalk powder in separate bowls, making sure that the colors wouldn’t mix. The kids were taking turns to do this and they REALLY loved crushing the chalk and sorting it by color.

We used the cups from Victoria’s tea sets for the chalk powder and when the chalk-crushing-fun was over, I added some water and used the brushes to mix it until I got a “paint looking” consistency.

And that was it! The kids could start their outdoor painting fun.

While Victoria and her fiend (5 and 6 years) first discussed and agreed to paint a fairy land with a huge rainbow, Lukas (3,5) did his own abstract art.

This kept the kids very focused for 30-40 min, and at the end we could admire the kids’ master pieces on the walls of our courtyard.

I hear you think “oh no, what a messy thing to have on your walls!” But the cleaning is also fairly easy to do. One option is to just wait for the rain to clean it all up for you, like we did last time with our chalk wall painting.

This time I decided to be more proactive about cleaning 🙂 I used a spray bottle filled with water and gave it to Lukas. I didn’t have to explain much and in no time he was spraying all over the walls with water, spraying the chalk paintings away. I helped him out to get to the places he wouldn’t reach and soon after my walls were clean again 🙂 This way is also more fun for the kids than the rain cleaning alternative!

This whole activity was lots of fun! From making to cleaning, it kept 3 kids busy for the whole afternoon.

Besides the fact that it supports the kid’s creativity, this outdoor kids activity is also a great discovery trip for the kids:

experiment with mixing colors and testing what’s the result of mixing them
test around until you get the right solid/liquid state of the chalk
some kiddie basic physic 🙂 (if there is lots of water in the mix, the paint will be running down the wall giving a bit of rainy effect to the drawing)

I definitely recommend doing this at home. You might not be as comfortable as me to get your walls painted, but I’m sure the kids would have just as much fun doing this on the pavement or on an easel.

Let me know if your kids like doing these kind of things too. Or do you play in a different way with chalk?

Note: I found the toy cups as being very handy for this activity because with their handle they were very easy to hold by the kids.

Posted in Craft and creativity, Toys-apps-games | Tagged Creative play, messy play, Outdoor play, painting | 1 Comment