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

15 great black & white ideas for babies…

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Angela

Babies love high contrast objects in the first months of their life

You probably heard it before. Newborn babies don’t see so well and their sight rapidly develops in the first months of their life. Before their sight is completely developped, they love to watch, or better say ‘stare’, at high contrast patterns. And what gives higher contrast than black & white shapes?

All 3 my kids loved it. Well, they didn’t admit so themselves. But the countless hours they’ve stared at those things is sufficient proof to me 🙂

Curious how you can bring some fascinating black & white into your baby’s young life? I’ve gathered a selection of 15 toys and ideas on our high contrast board on Pinterest. You can find there stuff such as:

Printable Black & White pages (free for personal use)
Ideas to make your own black & white objects
Toys combining black & white on one side and colorfull patterns on the other, so you can use them for different age periods of your baby

Do you have any other great black & white baby toys or ideas? Share them with us so we can add them to the board!

Posted in Craft and creativity, Toys-apps-games | Tagged babies, Toy favourite | Comments Off

Creative bath for kids – colored water and shaving cream painting

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Angela

Do your kids love to take a bath or they hate it?

I’ve seldom seen kids who don’t care; they either love it or hate it. And they might change opinion a couple of times in the first years of their life 🙂 Anyhow, here’s 2 tips on how you can make bath time a fun play activity that worked like a charm for us and our 2 year old Lukas who was hating taking a bath.

And with the warm weather these days, this can be useful also for creative outdoor play activities!

1: Water in your kid’s favorite color

What about a pink bath? Or a green bath? Let your kid choose it. With the help of a little liquid food coloring (which you can purchase in most supermarkets) you turn the water into any color you want. The more coloring liquid you add, the more intense the color. Once diluted in water, the colouring does NOT stain the skin or the bath. (You may want to test first if you are worried.)

Put a couple of drops in the water and let your kids mix it to get colorful water

2: Shaving foam as paint

When you’re at the supermarket for the food coloring, take as well a box of the cheapest shaving foam you find.

Take a couple of small containers, put some shaving foam in each and add some drops of food coloring….

… and let the kids do the rest.

If you’re not satisfied with the intensity of the color, add some more food coloring. In the end you should get something like this:

Our two oldest had a great time when we first tried this.
They were cheering constantly while painting all kind of shapes on each other bodies. When those were full, they attacked the walls and the borders of the bath tube and created pieces of art.

Luckily all was cleaned away easily with a bit of water!

Besides adding a lot of fun for our bath times, it was also a feast for the senses and provoked lots of chat, laughter and questioning from the 2 year old Lukas and 4 years old Victoria. Next time we’ll try to add some smell as well to make it even more interesting.

Have you ever tried making bath time more exciting? What did you do?

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged activities for children, bath play, colorful play, Creative play, Outdoor play, painting | Comments Off

How to Make an Airplane – Cardboard and Plastic Bottle Crafts

Posted on August 11, 2012 by Creatiful Kids

Looking for some easy plastic bottle crafts? Check out this cool and easy to make airplane craft.

On holidays (specially when plane trips are involved) you typically don’t carry bags full of toys and crafts materials. So if your kids are in a crafty mood, you have to do with whatever you find on the spot. But with a bit of creativity one can go a long way. Let me tel you how we ended up doing some plastic bottle crafts.

Some weeks ago on our holiday trip, the kids had been drawing and cutting planes out of paper- they kind of love making planes 🙂 . So I got involved into their play and challenged myself to make a plane using the materials we had at hand.

I found an empty plastic bottle and a big piece of carton from a 24-pack of beer and that was enough for my plastic bottle crafts idea. The rest, color pencils and a knife, make part of our standard travel equipment.

The cardboard was meant for the wings. And the beer bottle marks on it gave it kind of a funky look after coloring it with pencils.

The plastic bottle served as the body of the plane and pretty much the hardest part of this kids’ crafts activity was to cut two openings in the bottle so we could fit the wings through. This is one of the easiest plastic bottle crafts you can do.

And after sliding the colored piece of carton through the bottle, the plane was ready (from my point of view). The kids however, found some fun crafts paper tape in our travel bag and decided to continue the plastic bottle crafts and decorate their plane.

And after the tape-decorating task was done they concluded that they did enough plastic bottle crafts for the day and it was time to play. They played with the plane for the rest of the morning.

So I ended up having some happy kids with a new toy, and got experienced in doing plastic bottle crafts.

I hope you like our plane, and if you do something similar with your kids do share with us. This is our first to do plastic bottles crafts so we’re looking for some inspiration. Drop us a comment of post a picture of your project on our Facebook page.

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Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged activities for children, craft ideas, crafts for kids, crafts with bottles, crafts with cardboard, Creative play | Comments Off

What goes around comes around – taking care of animals in need of rescue

Posted on August 6, 2012 by Angela

Did you as a kid bring home animals found on the street and in need of rescue?

I remember that I did that a lot to my mother who ended up taking care of them … so I guess now it is my turn 🙂 Some days ago I found out with surprise that my daughter had brought home a little bird she had found on the street.

It was just two days before Victoria was to leave to her grandparents in Romania that she found this little bird that could not fly properly. Together with my mother she picked it up from the ground and brought it home.

When I arrived home from work I was greeted by an enthusiastic and glowing Victoria who dragged me from the entrance door to the living room to show me her little bird. That is when I had a”deja vu” feeling. According to my mother taking care of the bird would be very easy. We just need to feed it and keep it safe for more or less a week before it would be able to fly and survive on its own.

Confronted with the enthusiasm of our child, any kind of objections died long before they could be put into words … My husband is quite strict about not having animals in the house, I knew I would be the one to take care of it, but still … parents go a long way for a smile on their kids face. Finally we settled on the compromise that the bird would stay outside on our courtyard.

The courtyard turns out to be a good bird recovery place. It’s big enough so the bird gets some space and the high walls prevent any cats to come and get themselves a birdy meal.

And hey, even my husband admits that the bird brought us some nice moments and experiences.

As a first, Victoria couldn’t get enough of the bird on her arm. She was caressing it, feeding it and talking lots of bird stuff with my mother. As a plus she was learning some stuff about nature and animals in a fun way.

Even for Lukas this turned out to be a nice learning opportunity. Being the wild, stormy guy off the family, he scared of the bird at first. But slowly he learned to be calm and after a couple of days he got the hang of caressing the bird. He, and the bird, even got confident enough that he could feed the bird – the bird would open the beak and Lukas would gently put the food inside – you can imagine his joy!

I was playing mommy bird and responsible with feeding, and my husband was kind enough not to mind having temporary bird poo in our courtyard.

Eventually like all the things that grow, our little bird spread its wings and flew away. We’re all hoping that the bird is safe and sound, and who knows maybe she’ll visit us again someday. Anyway, we are again bird-free and I am pleased with that, but also with the nice experience we gave to our kids.

Can you guess what bird species we cared for during one week’s time?

Posted in Parenting | Tagged children and animals, positive parenting tips | Comments Off

A Good Sticker Book can be the Perfect Toy for on the Road or at Home.

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Angela

How can a good sticker book save the day. This is a review of our favorite Usborne sticker books.

Lately my kids are into stickers and if you ask them what they like most they’s tell you that they want to play with a sticker book. We really like the Usborne books and most of the sticker books our kids love are also from Usborne, so I thought to tell you why we think these books are so awesome and why my kids love them so much.

On one of our recent plane trips we got blown away by the effect of a simple doll sticker book had on our kids and how it kept them busy for most of the trip.

We travel frequently and kids on the plane are always a bit of stress. So for our last 4h plane trip with 3 kids we were hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. Among the toys we took with us were the two sticker books below and to our surprise, they kept the kids entertained for most of the way.

As a result, we obviously fell in love with these 2 sticker books 🙂

The only interaction we had to provide while Victoria played with her sticker book was some advice from time to time on where the stickers should be placed. Thanks to the activities in this sticker book, we enjoyed seeing the kids play independently during most of the flight!

The idea of these sticker books (film stars and pop stars, there is also a pirate version
for the boys :-)) is quite simple: there are 3 girls that need to be dressed for different occasions with different (many!) outfits/stickers. Each sticker book has 23 pages with different scenarios and each of these pages gave a correspondent page full with stickers.

Because the stickers a very colorful Victoria really enjoys to play with this sticker book. On top they can be used again and again, but if you do this too many times they will slowly loose the stickiness. We also noticed that if the hands are dirty or greasy obviously the stickers won’t stick so good -however Victoria doesn’t seem to mind.

And these sticker books have A LOT of stickers! It actually requires a small mind shift for adults. At first you think there are too many stickers for the scenes in the sticker book. That’s until you accept that you need to stick the stickers the same way you get dressed … one on top of the other! You might first put on a blouse, to then add a pullover or jacket on top.

To make it a little more interesting, I separate the pages with the stickers from the rest of the sticker book to make it easier to play with. This is quite easy to do and then Victoria chooses a scene from the sticker book she wants to play with. Then she looks for the corresponding page in the sticker book, trying to match the titles on each page and practicing some letter recognition.

Of course when we have friends visiting, they also get to have fun with the stickers 🙂

With our kids, another mind shift was to let go of our adult perfectionism. Because of the shape and dimensions of the stickers in this sticker book, Victoria (4,5), doesn’t always manage to put the clothes perfectly on the girls – but she is not bothered at all about this. In her eyes everything is perfect.

Anyhow, the fun is guaranteed regardless of age. Lukas (2,5) joins often the “sticker party” to comment on the fashionable items the girls are wearing or to play with his own sticker books featuring diggers and a zoo.

Do you have any favorite sticker book your kid is playing with? I’d love to hear about it.

Posted in Toys-apps-games | Tagged favorite sticker book, Toy favourite, usborne sticker books | Comments Off

Easy Craft Ideas for Kids with Balloons

Posted on July 15, 2012 by Angela

If you’re looking for some fun and easy craft ideas for kids that require no preparations, you’re in the right place!

We’re a busy family so I’m always looking for easy craft ideas to do with the kids. What you need for this activity is some balloons and some pens (who doesn’t have that in the house?). You must have guessed it by now, I’m talking about drawing on balloons! You probably picture in your head a balloon with a face drawn on it. But why limit yourself, or your kids, to that? Read on to see what we did.

Some days ago we had to keep Victoria and Lukas quiet for a while we were feeding baby Elena and making food for the rest of us. In other words were in need of some easy craft ideas for kids. We gave them a set of balloons and some pens and asked them if they wanted to draw on the balloon. And you can imagine what the answer was 🙂

We got some face-balloons back, but Victoria really liked it so she continued drawing houses, a sun, people, … we soon had whole cities coming to life on our balloons!

You can try this at home, on a trip, virtually anywhere

So if you look for some easy craft ideas for kids, draw something on balloons. Here are our tips for this easy craft for kids:

Use normal ball pens with a not to sharp point (ballpoint): We’ve tried many other writing tools in the past. With most of the felt pens (even permanent ones) we found that you get too much undesired mess on the hands, clothes, as the ink gets off. Pens are just right; the only risk is that the balloon might pop if the kids draw with too much passion 🙂
Don’t stick to the stereotype face-balloon. Encourage your child to be creative and make up his or her own artistic scenes. Challenge them to draw something else than they would normally do
It’s handy to draw on balloons when traveling with kids as it’s easier for them to hold a balloon on their lap than a coloring book or a piece of paper. On top a pack of balloons is small and easy to take and the crafty balloons can afterwards serve for some fun play!

If you’re looking for more, you might also like these easy craft ideas for kids. I wish you lots of fun with these simple craft ideas for kids.

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged activities for children, coloring and drawing, Creative play, indoor activities for kids, travel with kids | 2 Comments

How to Make your own Cardboard Crafts for Kids – City in a Box

Posted on July 6, 2012 by Angela

If you’re looking for some easy craft ideas involving a cardboard box, have a look at one of our favorite cardboard crafts for kids.

How is the milk you buy being packed, in boxes or bottles? We’re buying milk that comes packed in cardboard boxes. And with 3 little milk drinkers in the house and a cafe late addict -yours truly – we end up consuming quite some milk and end up having quite some cardboard boxes lying around. I initially thought they’re too small and unpractical, so I’d just recycle them with the rest of the paper in the house. That was until the moment I got the idea to do some cardboard crafts for kids, and I thought to make something easy and fun: a city.

Our milk cardboard boxes look as on the pictures below: A bottom and two sides that are too crappy for any serious usage, but just great for our easy cardboard crafts for kids.

All you need for this easy easy craft with cardboard is a cardboard box, a pen and some imagination. Unlike other cardboard crafts for kids here there are no drawing skills required even a 4 year old can do this.

This is what we did:

Step 1: Put one of the sides down so that you can have more space to draw for the roads.
Step 2: Draw houses on the vertical sides and roads on the horizontal piece.
Step 3: Add some characters and cars.

And that’s it, you’re done! I told you it’s one of the easiest cardboard crafts for kids didn’t I? 🙂

It was that easy to do, that Victora (4) did her own version of the town while I was drawing Lukas’s city.

Later on the kids decided to put the 2 cities together to get even more playing space. I connected some roads in between the 2 cardboard boxes and our big city was created. But like any big city, it was in need of traffic lights and some roads under constructions- as Victoria pointed out to me.

So armed with some colored pencils Victoria took care of the safety of the traffic in our miniature city, while Lukas was busy testing the roads and parking the cars. This is such a fun and easy craft idea and the kids played with their city for quite some time.

When they will loose interest in the play city, I will just put it out with the paper. Since our supply of milk cardboard boxes is kind of continuous, we’ll just make a new one when needed. It only takes a couple of minutes anyway.

So as a conclusion: this is a fun, fast to make, stimulating and on top an environmental friendly project.

Try this out, and if you do, leave us a message to say how it went or put a picture on our Facebook page.

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged Cardboard boxes, craft ideas, crafts for kids, crafts with cardboard | 2 Comments

Storytelling, one of our positive-parenting-tips tips for teaching patience with children

Posted on July 3, 2012 by Angela

Why storytelling is one of our favorite positive-parenting-tips tips we use with our kids.

The second topic of our series of positive-parenting-tips tips and teaching patience and sharing to kids, is all about storytelling.

The concept itself doesn’t need much explanation. There are plenty of situations where you want your kids to be patient in order to avoid difficult situations. We’ve been searching for some positive-parenting-tips tips that can be used to help small kids the concept of patience. So we tried to teach the kids to be patient by engaging them in a fun story. All this requires is a basic knowledge of what interests your kids at the moment (Princesses? Dinosaurs? Trains? Dancing? …) and build your story around these. The more interactive you make it, the longer you can keep it going. Victoria sometimes amazes us by making up the story all by herself.

Let me tell you about a recent experience we had just to show you how powerful this storytelling can be …If you like it, you can add storytelling to the positive-parenting-tips tips you use with your kids 🙂

Not long ago Victoria was in the hospital for a polyp surgery. Prior to the surgery, some pretests needed to be done such as a hearing test, looking at the polyps and also a blood test.

The idea of a blood tests would already get many parents nervous: You imagine the needle and soon after you picture of your kids going through the roof screaming of pain and fear. I suppose the reality gets sometimes close to that cause the nurses asked us to apply some cream one hour before which basically functions as a local anesthesia.

An so, my thoughts were with my wife that day as she accompanied Victoria to the hospital. First thing coming home in the evening I wanted to know how it went. Hearing her describe the events of the day was both fun and amazing. Here are a couple of extracts of her ‘report’:

‘When Victoria was ready on the bed, the nurse asked me to have her turn her head away so she wouldn’t see the needle and get afraid of it. To fully distract Victoria, I started telling her about our upcoming holiday.” (note: Recently Victoria showed an increasing interest to go swimming and she has always been fond of planes, so my wife made us of that to get Victoria engaged) “And so I told her how we’d take the plane and go to a hotel with many swimming pools. I was enthusiastic and so was she. She started telling me all the things she wanted to do on our holiday.”

“When the nurse was done she told me she was amazed about how patient Victoria had been throughout the job. “She really trusts you”, the nurse told me. I of course like to believe she trusts me, but according to me she was just so much into the story that she had no more attention for anything else.”

Amazing! A normally painful event got handled in a very smooth way. And the best of all was the reaction of Victoria at the end when she told my wife “But mommy, I didn’t see what the nurse did!” with a very disappointed face. She had been so curious about the whole thing and now she missed it all … 🙂

Storytelling works most of the times for us. Whenever we need our kid(s) to be patient (in a waiting room, in the car, at the doctor, …) or whenever we need/want them to do something they don’t like (blood tests, combing their hair, …), me or my wife would start talking to them in an enthusiastic and engaging way telling them a story. So that’s one of our positive-parenting-tips tips: storytelling.

Not sure how much the storytelling teaches the kids to be patient, but it sure compensates the lack of patience and gets you through some potentially hard times. That’s why storytelling is high on the list of our positive-parenting-tips tips.

Posted in Parenting | Tagged Parenting tips, Patience with children | 1 Comment

Fun pasta games for kids with colored spaghetti

Posted on June 25, 2012 by Angela

Children of different ages, from babies to preschoolers, can play with these fun pasta games for kids.

After a morning of color, discovery, and other fun pasta games for kids – as you could read in my previous post – I put some of our wonder toy aside for a later play date. Well…this came sooner than I thought as the kids wanted to continue playing with the fun pasta in the afternoon of the same day.

How to turn colored spaghetti into some fun pasta games for kids of different ages. My 3 explorers, a baby, a toddler and a preschooler made their own fun pasta games:

Elena (7 months), investigated with curiosity the spaghetti. Feeling the texture, checking the color and exercising her fine motor skills while trying to get hold of the piece she was interested in. Lots of colorful fun for our (not so little any more) baby. This was a sensory and fun pasta game for her.

Lukas (2,5 years) found it very interesting to mix the spaghetti with a spoon. He told me that it could not be done with the hand as the steering needs to be done always with a spoon.

Then, once the steering was done we played some more fun pasta games for kids and tried to find the the transparent spoon in the spaghetti pot. He was hiding it and amazingly enough I was not able to see it, while of course he did manage to find it. This last game gave him so much satisfaction!

It is funny to discuss with my toddler Lukas , at the age when he is so keen on keeping routines and sticking to procedures. I specially enjoy to hear him explain to me how things should be done and how they shouldn’t 🙂

Victoria (4 years) had her own fun pasta games for kids. She was interested in stacking and sorting by color, and she got me and her brother involved in this. While she was busy sorting the pink spaghetti (yes..she adores pink!) me and Lukas had to work on the green ones. So while sorting, I was discussing with Lukas about the color of the different spaghetti in the bowl and trying to figure out together which ones were the green ones.

This was quite a fun afternoon and I was happy to see that although of different ages all my little ones enjoyed the fun pasta games for kids we did that day.

If you want to try this out yourself at home -and I encourage you to do so- make sure to put something on the floor that you don’t mind getting dirty, cause these fun pasta games for kids are a bit messy. If you’d rather have a no mess kids activity, have a look at this sensory activities with rice, or see here another method to color pasta without boiling it.

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged activities for children, colorful play, crafts for kids, Creative play, food coloring, messy play, sensory play | 2 Comments

Colored Spaghetti, a Fun Pasta Craft for Kids

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Angela

An activity for all ages with colored spaghetti – fun, colorful and a bit messy, check out this fun pasta craft for kids of different ages.

This time for our weekend play activity project I experimented for the first time with food coloring to make a sensory play activity with colored spaghetti. I’ll call it our fun past a craft instead of our fun pasta eating 🙂

What you need for this fun pasta craft with kids:

Pasta -I used about 500g of spaghetti. but you can also use some leftover pasta from the previous dinner for this activity.
Food coloring
different pots for mixing the colors
A bit of oil

While the kids were having their breakfast I boiled the spaghetti, split them in different pots and mixed in the food coloring and a bit of oil. It all went quite smooth, the only hick up was that I actually used much more food coloring than I thought I would. But the result looked fantastic!

I put the pot with the colored spaghetti in the “kids corner” in our living room for my kids to discover. I also placed baby Elena on a pregnancy pillow so she could be close to the action and then i waited to see what will the two older kids do.

Victoria spotted the new intriguing object very fast and came close. Lukas joined in and a few seconds later they were enthusiastically mixing the spaghetti and discovering their new toy. True sensory play and lots of fun. First they discovered that spaghetti can stick to the hands …

… then they tasted them and they found that, although funny looking, they still taste like spaghetti.

Victoria exercised her fine motor skills and tried unsuccessfully to make a knot …

… then she tried making spaghetti balls, but also without much success.

The kids had tons of fun and so did I! And this turns out a great activity that no matter the age, they can all three play with.

After a morning of spaghetti delight, i put some of the colored pasta in the freezer, to be stored for another messy playing experience later on. And I covered the leftover with a plastic foil so they won’t dry and so we can play with them later on during the weekend.

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged activities for children, crafts for kids, Creative play, food coloring, messy play, sensory play | 1 Comment