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Children’s self-portraits

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join art spark winter workshop

Fill your winter with colour!

Click here to get your Art Spark resources.

I’ll guide you through four weeks of beautiful and fun art projects that you can enjoy with your children. At home or at school, these process art projects will give you an interesting framework of activities that you can weave into your weeks, so your children are engaged, creating and enjoying themselves all through art. See more details of Art Spark here.

self portrait

Following on from our faces book, how about trying to draw self-portraits?

Drawing Self- Portraits

Sit your child in front of a mirror to let them have a really good look at themselves. With young children you can name the different parts of their face and have them pull funny faces. Encourage older children to look in much more detail – at the colours in their iris and the different shades in their hair. Is their face really a circle shape? Are both sides perfectly symmetrical? Do they look like someone else in the family?

Then get creating. You can draw with just one colour, or paint, or even make a collage with wool for hair. Younger children are likely to produce very simple portraits – but, having had a good look at eyebrows and eyelashes in the mirror, they may surprise you by adding in some new details to their picture.

It’s always good to lead the way and show how adults can be crafty too – so why not have a go at your own portrait alongside them?

Complete art lesson plans, exploring great artists

Junk model horse riding stables

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We’re getting ready for the Carnival of Junk Play on Friday 3rd December!

What do you think of our riding school? We have stables, jumps, a daisy filled paddock and some prize winning rosettes – and all made for free using re-cycled materials from our beloved making box. B has been off school ill this week and we needed a good ‘sitting down’ activity to keep us busy and cheer us up – and this is what we made. It was a totally spontaneous project, put together after a rummage through the junk box to see what materials we could find.

The base is made from a big piece of cardboard from a packing box, which happened to have a circular shape marked out in the centre which seemed to say ‘paddock’! The jump is made from two Smarties tubes, turned inside out,  with a wooden skewer, snapped in half and poked through the tubes to make the cross bars.

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The stables are made from tissue boxes, and the one on the end which has proper stable doors is made from a teabag box. We covered them in sugar paper, held in place with sticky tape – as you know we can’t wait for glue to dry when we want to get playing. The prize winning rosettes are made from little gift bows salvaged from some presents, with a ribbon made from sugar paper.

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We have a bucket with a pipe-cleaner handle, wool for straw and a biscuit tray cut up and stuck inside each stable to make a feeding trough (there’s probably a proper horsey word for that isn’t there?) The bunting is made from wool, old wrapping paper and held up on wooden skewers. And the paddock was painted with poster paint, sprinkled with a little glitter while it was still wet, and with some daisies (cut from a remnant of edging from my sewing basket) glued on.

Not all our junk models are this grand – L’s boat was very simple, but they both sum up what I love best about junk modelling:

it’s recycled, it costs nothing, it’s creative and it’s makes a toy with lots more play value to it.

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Want more happy handmade crafts?

Our Happy Handmade resource is bursting with colourful and imaginative crafts and DIY toys that are designed to add even more colour and creativity to your home. With easy-to-follow tutorials and free patterns and printables, you can read, make, and start playing today! See more of Happy Handmade here.

Catherine wheel firework craft

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Perfect for Bonfire Night or any time you need some fireworks, here’s an easy way to make a Catherine Wheel.

catherine wheel

Take a circle of paper or thin card. Fold it in half to make a semi-circle shape and make a cut, but not all the way to the centre. Unfold the circle and fold it again to make a semi-circle the other way. Make another cut, but again, not all the way to the centre.

Unfold your circle and fold one corner of each quarter section into the centre. Fasten in place with a paper fastener.

Decorate your Catherine wheel with sparkly stickers and sequins. Add ribbons or streamers to the edges for extra twirling effect.

Roll up a piece of paper into a long tube shape to make your handle. Use the paper fastener to attach the Catherine wheel to your handle.

Then blow! Here’s Take One – not quite as easy as she thought!

And here’s Take Two – when she’d mastered the art of Catherine wheel twirling.

Did you notice she blew so hard the feather flew right off? I do love L.

happily shared with Kids Get Crafty and No Time for Flash Cards

Firework craft

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With both Bonfire Night and Diwali being celebrated this week, we thought we’d get the glitter out to make a firework painting.

1. Use some black paper to be your sky.

2. Put a small blob of paint on your sky and blow it out into a firework shape using a drinking straw. Make sure you use runny paint, make sure your blow rather than suck, and make sure you keep your hair out of the way! You can make great explosion shapes.

3. While the paint is still wet, sprinkle on some glitter to give your fireworks some extra pizzazz!

4. Leave your pictures to dry, shake off any excess glitter and display your fireworks on the wall.

 

 

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Download your ready-made Diwali Unit

 

Download the Play Academy’s ready-made Diwali thematic unit and you’ll be ready to lead a week of fun and educational activities for your children to learn about and celebrate the Hindu Festival of Lights.

Pine cone crafts

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pine cone birds

I love putting out some goodies for the girls to pounce on when they come home from school and then seeing what they come up with. Last week  they had a selection of wool, pine cones, ribbons and feathers – and they decided to make some birds. They used craft glue to stick their materials to the pine cone and here are their creations.

We tied B’s bird to the end of our number line, which happens to hang over the radiator in the kitchen – the perfect place for our cat to sit and make swipes at the pine cone bird. L, ever since she started imaginative play, has always centred it around families so I wasn’t surprised she made a nest full of birds.

I like to see how they both take the same materials but add their own spin to what they make. It’s also great to see that 4 year old L is starting to conceive an idea and is now able, all by herself, to put together the bits and pieces she needs to bring her design to life.

What have you got lying around the house and garden that your children could make with?

And don’t forget it’s the Messy Play Carnival here on Friday – come and link a post!

happily shared with We Play at Childhood 101 and ABCand123 and Upcycled Awesome

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