Easy Craft Ideas for Kids

Children like to stay active, and one way to both keep them busy and have some family time is making crafts. Crafts not only allow children to be creative, but also to feel important. They offer a chance to work together doing something everyone can enjoy. These crafts do not need to be complicated. There are many craft ideas which need few materials, make little mess and can be adapted to different ages. If you home school or simply want to provide more enrichment, you can also use crafts for education.

Christmas Crafts
A good way to celebrate the holidays together is by making holiday crafts. There are many ideas for every holiday. You can also include crafts for holidays in other cultures or countries if you want to promote multi-cultural learning. Christmas provides an especially good opportunity for making Christmas cards, simple Christmas tree decorations like construction-paper chains, snowflakes, Christmas trees, stockings and wreaths. The website Activity Village has instructions for how to make your own snow globes which needs only a jar, polymer clay or a small Christmas decoration, glycerine and glitter. The Enchanted Learning website also has ideas for how to make a roaring winter fireplace from two brown paper bags, scissors, glue, tape, marker, construction paper and red and brown paint; paper plate angels; paper bag reindeer puppets; handprint trees and stand-alone paper stars.

Seasonal Crafts
You can organize you crafts by season as well as by holiday. Summer is a good time for making craft like seashell animals, custom kids' sunglasses and bright paper plate sunflowers. Disney Family Fun has information about how to make a waterproof beach bag using a garbage back, colored duct tape and some white cording for the handle. Springtime is a good opportunity to make tissue paper or paper plate flowers, herb pots or terrariums. In fall, use the falling leaves for a family tree or leaf rubbings, or make scarecrows, pumpkin seed necklaces or twig picture frames.

Balloon Crafts
Kids like balloons, and you can usually purchase a large amount for little money. Balloons can be used in a number of crafts and as a base for papier-mache. You can easily make ghosts, spiders or birds from balloons and grocery bags or pipe cleaners. Enchanted Learning has detailed instructions for making papier-mache dinosaur hats, globes, octopus, piggy banks and jack o-lanterns using balloons as well. Doing crafts using papier-mache can be great fun but can be a quite messy and needs a safe place to dry untouched, so these are best done with older children.