Keeping the Kiddos Busy

If you have a garden or a backyard or even just a few indoor plants, you and your children can gather a few leaves.  There are so many activities you can do with them. Just from among the activities that were featured in this blog, you can make leaf rubbings , leaf prints , or negative leaf prints using the splatter painting technique . Then, you can also press them and make projects with them. Just insert them between the pages of an old telephone directory, put some heavy books or other heavy items on top of the directory for weight, and leave the leaves alone for a few days.  When they are already dry, you can use them to decorate cards, book marks, or other items.  Or you can simply make pretty pictures with them. Another thing you can do with pressed leaves is to make an herbarium. "Herbarium" is just a fancy name for a leaf scrap book.  Just mount  the leaves on one sheet of paper each and write descriptions of each plant, and then bind the sheet...

The idea behind stamp printing is simple: apply paint to your stamp, and then stamp it on the surface you want to decorate while the paint is still wet.  You can get creative with the stamps you make and use. A common stamp printing project is potato printing , where you carve out your design on a potato half and use the potato half as a stamp.  You can try printing the natural textures of other vegetables and fruits .  You can also make stamps from recycled materials.    You can also be creative with the surfaces you decorate.  If you have textile paint, you can use stamp printing to decorate shirts. You can decorate wooden surfaces too.  You can use stamp printing to make cards, book marks, gift wrappers, and other similar items. Again, the possibilities are endless.