Art, Crafts, & Fine Motor Activities

3D Art History Lesson. Show kids how to draw a 3D box. Show them paintings from art history where people knew about/used linear perspective (think Italian Renaissance) and where they did not (think Medieval Europe or some of the brush paintings in Eastern Asia).

Basic Sewing. Kids 6+ can learn how to sew on a button and sew a simple pillow. You can start with a thick blunt needle, yarn, and felt, or burlap for practice.

Cardboard Loom Mug Rug Take a piece of cardboard, cut indentations in top and bottom, string to make loom. Weave with yarn. Tie ends. Remove. Reference: https://www.instructables.com/id/how-to-weave-on-a-cardboard-loom/

Clay Sculpture. Sculpey can be baked in a normal oven. There is also air-dry clay. Or play-doh. Strengthens muscles in hands, which is super important for handwriting later.

Color Theory Pick a subject & give them a color scheme to work with:

• Analogous (3 colors next to each other on the color wheel, like yellow/green/blue or blue/purple/red)
• Complimentary (opposites on the color wheel, like red & green, blue & yellow, or yellow & purple)
• Greyscale (black & white)
• Monochromatic (1 rainbow color + black + white)
• Primary (red, yellow, blue)
• Secondary (orange, purple, green as seen in pic)

Draw a Map of your home/neighborhood/city. Label important things/places. You can be surprised at the things that are prominent on your child’s map, and this helps to build memory, direction sense, and spatial reasoning.

Easy Dragon Craft Cut green paper into strips, glue/tape into different size rings. String onto a long piece of yarn. Embellish with pieces cut into duck-foot shapes. Create legs with pipe cleaner. Add googly eyes, or draw them on (possibly before rolling into tube).

Optional: add red/orange/yellow tissue paper streamers from head to make into fire-breathing dragon.

Enlarging Art Using Grids Draw a small grid on art. Draw a larger grid on paper. Note coordinates of important features (tip of beak, inner corner of eye, where foot meets branch). Use what is in one grid to draw the same thing in the other grid. (e.g., this square has a line that goes diagonally from top left corner to the bottom edge at about the 2/3 mark). Great for spatial reasoning.

Make Your Own Board Game Get a sheet of paper or poster board and draw out a path you can use with dice or a spinner. Add unexpected twists, such as shortcuts, loose a turn, go back ? number of spaces, or go back to start.  Do you need to collect anything along the way? If you have polymer clay (such as Sculpey), you can challenge your kids to make their own game tokens.

Make Your Own Paper - Take paper scraps (or even cloth or other plant fibers). Mix with water to form a wet slurry using a blender or food processor. Spread slurry onto an old screen in a thin layer. Let dry.

Origami - A great starter project is an origami corner bookmark, which can be decorated to look like a cute face. Other good starters are fortune teller/hand puppets.
https://www.itsalwaysautumn.com/diy-origami-bookmarks-print-fold.html

Photography Challenge.
Challenge kid to go on a scavenger hunt photographing different textures. For example: soft, hard, rough, fluffy, spiny, smooth, rugged, sharp, wet.

Alternatively ask them to photograph from different viewpoints. For example, go right next to the trunk of a tree and photograph up. Compare with a photo taken above a plant. Have them shoot through an aperture (like where you have branches in the extreme foreground framing something in the background).

If you need an image editor, GIMP is like a free version of Photoshop.

Soapstone Carving - soapstone blanks for welders are soft enough that you could carve them with a sturdy paperclip. If kid complains about the size/shape, remind them that many animal bones are long & skinny, so it's an ancient design problem.

You need to have some hand strength, so better for older kids.

You can get 4 welders blanks for about $4 at Lowes. You can also get larger blocks of soapstone on Amazon, but you may need chisels to work with it. Note: image is from a larger block of soapstone.

Sidewalk Chalk Bugs. Teach head, thorax, abdomen, 2-4 wings, 2 antennae, 6 legs for insects. 8 legs and 2 body parts for spiders.

Tangrams - You can make your own with colored paper, if you don’t have any. Have kids try to make pictures with them. Great for building imagination and spatial reasoning. Need ideas? Try https://www.tangram-channel.com/

Teach Shading to Older Kids. Greyscale and 2 examples using color (shadows are cooler, highlights are warmer). Warm color scheme is yellow, orange, red, purple. Cool color scheme is yellow, green, blue, indigo.

Turn Scribble 'Mistakes' Into Art. Make a random scribble. Challenge child to turn it into something as a drawing. Then they make a small doodle for you to embellish.

Improves fine motor skills, visualization, turn taking, & flexible thinking/the sense that it's possible to fix mistakes with some imagination.

Storytime tie-in: Reginia's Big Mistake