10 Easy Ways to Make Your Child's Room a Creative Play Area

You hear it all the time. Children watch too much television, spend too much time on the computer, and not enough time being kids. I'm sure everybody has read a study or two on the effects of arts and crafts on a child's growing mind. Effects range from helping them learn faster and mastering mathematics with ease, to better controlled behavior and emotions. All from exposure to art and being encouraged to exercise their imaginations.

How do I get them interested in arts and crafts? What activities should I do with my child? I have a busy schedule, When would I fit in the time to do extra activities with them? These are some of the questions a parent is faced with when they want to start introducing art sessions to their child. While you should spend time doing creative things with your child, it is not necessary to always stand over them. In fact, many children get bored with arts and craft time simply because an adult is there to distract and "guide" them. Like any artist, kids sometimes need time to play and create on their own. One of the best ways to do this is to make their room into a creative play area. This is perfect for when you need them to get out from under your feet for a while, say when you're preparing dinner. You could make art and craft time when YOU need them occupied the most. This also lets them run off some of their energy before bedtime. You could make a nightly ritual of reviewing and complimenting their works done that day before tucking them into bed, giving them praise and encouragement as a last thought before drifting off to sleep.

Here are 10 ideas I have created and put together on making your child's room creativity friendly:

1. Children love chalkboards. There is a special kind of wall paint, available in most paint stores, that will dry as a chalk board surface. Buy a gallon of chalk board paint and paint a wall in their bedroom. Hang a little bucket of chalk next to it and then they can "color" on the walls. Just remember to stress to them they can only color on THAT wall.

2. Buy a few large dry erase boards from walmart or a dollar store. Pop them out of their frames and using small nail, start at the bottom of a wall in their bedroom and nail the boards to the wall. Dry erase board is fairly easy to cut if you need to fit smaller pieces together. Go up the wall about 4 - 5 feet. Hang dry erase markers and erasers on a long string near the boards. Again stress that this is the only area they can draw on.

3. Get magnetic memo boards, leave the frames on to prevent injury, and fit 4 - 8 of them together on their wall. Remember, kids are short so place them low to the floor for easy access. Then cut out a bunch of pictures of family, friends, school mates, their favorite cartoons, picnic tables, camp fires, roads, houses ( photos of inside and out ) and so on. Buy a large pack of magnets and glue the pictures onto them. Now your child can create their own fun story boards involving all the things they love.

4. Post-It makes a super sticky self-stick wall pad that is a great make-shift easel for kids. Buy one or two and stick them on their closet door. ( While they are at school you could also leave them loving or praising notes on their pad to read when they get home. )

5. Give them their own crafting station in their room. Buy a small desk and fill it with coloring books, markers, pens, crayons, pencils, paints, and etc. Keep a box of printer paper next to the desk for whenever they want to draw, paint, color, or write. In a drawer or other storage area near the desk, keep modeling clay. You can pick up a large pack at dollar tree and this provides hours of sculpting entertainment.

6. Create a play area in the corner of their room. Take a large cardboard box and paint one side to resemble a beach scene, one side a grocery store, one side an ice cream shop with all the different "ice creams", and the other a teachers desk. Keep a toy box nearby divided into 4 sections. Use large pieces of cardboard to create the dividers and label each section with masking tape to correspond with the scenes on the box. Then fill each section with items they will need to create those scenes. For an ice cream shop, save ice cream containers, buy a scoop at a dollar store, make cones out of poster board or construction paper, and include lots of play doe for the ice cream. For a grocery store, save cereal boxes, jars, containers, and other grocery store items. Include fake money or save those fake credit cards from credit card offers you get in the mail. Do not forget a toy cash register. For a teachers desk, fill that section of the box with a coffee mug full of pens and pencils, an old pair of glasses with the lenses removed, books so they can read and teach the class, and buy a few workbooks for them to grade. You can usually get them at kmart or walmart to help teach your child math, science, history, grammar, letters and numbers, and a variety of other subjects for each grade level. You could also just search for homework help online and print out a stack of things they can have siblings, you, or neighborhood kids complete while playing with them. For a beach, include an empty bottle of sunscreen, towels, sunglasses, a little CD player with headphones, bathing suits, and a beach ball.
Cut the box apart and set them behind the toy box. Then they can choose which adventure to act out by selecting a scene board and propping it against the wall as a back drop. You could also leave the box in one piece, make sure its taped well, keep a chair near by and then they have a ready made cash register stand to set the register and groceries on, a teachers desk, or an ice cream shop counter ready to hold all the ice cream containers. For the beach, they can simply lay all their items in front of it as a back drop. The possible scenarios are endless.

7. Young girls may enjoy making their own paper beads for jewelry. Fill a small box, or if you buy the big boxes of printer paper you could use the lid of the box as a paper tray, with blank printer paper, discarded pages of magazines, scrap book paper, tissue paper, brown grocery store bags, construction paper and newsprint. Keep it by their desk with some glue, scissors, cord or thread, and Q-Tips. They can paint draw, color, and design to their hearts content on the paper and then cut them into strips of all sizes and shapes. Once the paper is cut they can put a small strip of glue at one end of the paper, lay a Q-Tip on the glue, and tightly start to roll the bead up. For every 1/3" - 1/2" add a little bit more glue until the bead is completely rolled up. Gently twist and turn to slid the Q-Tip out without unraveling the bead. Once the Q-Tip is removed, then they can trim or shape the bead with scissors or leave as is. Once all the beads are made they can string them together to make bracelets, anklets, and necklaces. They can also paint the beads once finished so they all match. To protect them from coming apart, brush their beads with clear nail polish. Paper beads have been around for a long time and you can find many books on various ways to make them. If your child really enjoys this hobby, check your local library for books on paper bead techniques. One book I found quite descriptive and easy to read was, " Creating Extraordinary beads from ordinary materials" by Tina Casey. It includes many flashy photos the children can look at and try to re-create. She also gives them templates they can trace to make certain bead effects.

8. Make a batch of salt dough for your child to sculpt with.
4 cups flour
1 cup salt
1-1/2 cups hot water (from tap)
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
They can knead it with their hands ( about 10 minutes ) and then sculpt anything they want. Once they are done sculpting you can bake it for them in your oven at 200 degrees F for approximately 1 hour per 1/2 inch thickness. Once baked and cooled they can paint it using acrylic paints or watercolors. Put up a few shelves in their room so they can display their sculptures. This gives them encouragement every time they look up and see something they created proudly displayed. Salt dough would also come in handy in idea # 6 for creating a bakery scene. Let them make "cookies, cakes, other treats" to sell in their bakery. Once baked they will resemble actual treats. They can "icing" the cakes with paint.

9. Hang a large thin board on the wall by their bed. Have them pick out pictures that remind them of happy memories. These could be family pictures of a vacation, magazine photos of things they like, drawings they have done, photos of pets, anything. Give them glue and let them glue those pictures to the board to make a collage. Then whenever they are sad they can go over to that board and remember all those happy memories. Encourage them to add to the board when they are angry or upset. This will get them thinking about happier things and dispel their sadness while still encouraging creativity. When the board is full, take it down and hang another one up so they can start fresh. Write the date it was started and completed and their age on the back. Wrap the finished boards in plastic and store them in a dry attic or closet. Then as the child gets older, you can occasionally pull them out, and they can look through them to see what was important to them at certain ages. It will be like their own personally created scrapbook detailing their childhood interests. You could also display them if you have the wall space, rather than storing them away.

10. This is not for the faint of heart.
One sure way to make your child's room have an inviting creative atmosphere is to let them decorate it themselves. Take them to the hardware store and let them pick out any color paints they want. You may want to set a limit on how many they can choose! If your budget allows it, let them go wild with paint colors. Remove everything from their room. Lay down a painters tarp. Use painters tape and newspaper to cover windows and anything that should not get covered in paint. Dress yourself and child in very old clothing. Give them paint brushes, sponges, foam stampers, paint rollers, and any other tools. Open up the paint cans and stand back! Let them paint how ever they want. Just sit by and observe them. They may even ask you to join in. Resist the urge to fix their "mistakes". Just go along with what they want. If they are just splattering paint on the wall, do the same. If you make a horrible shudder every time they splatter a big brush full of fire engine red onto a splatter of tangerine orange and rush to cover it up, they'll get the wrong idea. This is why I say, this is not for the faint at heart. To you, your child's room will look crazy, to say the least. To them, it is a wonderful masterpiece. Every time they walk into their room, they will see those walls, grin, and think of how much fun they had. Expect them to want to repeat this many times over the years.

Hopefully, these ideas have helped inspire you. You probably have a few of your own now to help spark your child's creative mind. They may not always be in an artistic mood but at least they will have an imagination friendly environment for when the mood does strike them. Imagination is something many adults lose as they grow older, encourage your child to use their to the fullest. Even something as simple as having them make up a bedtime story once and while, instead of being read to, will help exercise their imagination. Children can be some of the best storytellers!