Finding fun arts and crafts ideas that you haven’t done with your family before is difficult. Especially when each new idea you find requires buying more supplies. Which is why we thought these 4 DIY’s would be a great way to utilise the things you already have laying around the house or garden. 

We’ll take a look at:

1. Making games with sticks and twigs
2. Cloud dough
3. Swishy gel bag
4. Treasure sensory instrument

Making up games using sticks and twigs

Other than the obvious sword fighting games, you can use sticks and twigs to create new games that are more fun for every family member. A great example of this is making stick sculptures with the help of elastic bands to hold them in place.

Get creative with this and ask your kids to design their own games – they’ll come up with much more imaginative ideas than us adults will.

Another idea using natural objects from the garden for arts and crafts, is to design pictures with leaves, flowers and other flat things. You can then place the end result in a frame, pressing them together with plastic panes from Simply Plastics.

Colourful cloud dough

An idea from pbs.org is to cook up a batch of coloured cloud dough. As the recipe says on their site, you’ll need:

• Flour
• Oil
• Oil or gel-based food colouring
• Glitter or any additional decoration

Your end result should look a little like this image from their website: 

Squishy gel bags

As strange as this one sounds, creating squishy gel bags are a great way for your kids to explore a new world of sensory play. For those of you who haven’t heard of sensory play, it’s exactly what you’d expect!

Sensory play is all about letting your kids explore their senses; smell, sound, touch, taste and sight. Hence, a squishy gel bag is perfect for your kids to explore touch, sound and sight. Maybe even smell, if you added some essential oils to the mix.

Source: Hands On As We Grow / Nature-Sensory-Bag-Suncatcher

What will you need?

• Leak-proof sealable, see-though plastic bags
• Gel, washing up liquid, oil or paint (keep in mind paint will dry)
• Glitter and any other additional textures

All you need to do, is get your kids to stick all your chosen ingredients into the bag and seal it up. It can prove handy when they’re bored, just get out their squishy gel bags and let them have fun squishing it as much as they like! As long as they don’t squeeze it so much it bursts.

You can find the full guide on making squishy gel bags here.

Treasure sensory instrument

Yet another sensory arts and crafts idea. Taken from Mumstown, you can learn about how to make one here.

Image Source: Mumstown

In brief, you’ll need a jar and some objects to fill up the jar. All you’re going to be doing here is filling it up with seeds, rice and anything that makes a noise when shaken.

Do you have any ideas?

If you’ve got some interesting arts and crafts ideas for the rest of our reader, please don’t hesitate to tell us all about them in the comments. Anyway, have fun creating these with your family! 
Shared:
Traffic Jam Weekend