Crafting Secrets

For more kids crafts visit and info: www.simplekidscrafts.com info@simplekidscrafts.com Also visit: www.artsandcraftstv.com Manualidades para niños en Español www.manualidadesconninos.com Manualidades para adultos en Español: www.manualidadestv.com Muslim Kids Videos and Crafts: www.muslimkidstv.com Background Music: Free Royalty Free Music from: www.partnersinrhyme.com Free Music by Kevin MacLeod from: incompetech.com Public domain music downloaded from: www.virushead.net About Simple Kids Crafts: Simple Kids Crafts is a blog dedicated to reviving the old art of handicrafts. and art that has been lost to fabricated toys. We provide easy fun crafts, with step by step instructions, coloring pages, home school resources, educational resources, kids arts and crafts projects for teachers and all for free! The focus of the site is mainly on preschool, kindergarten, and elementary school crafts. Make wonderful, easy, simple crafts with things found around the house featuring: paper crafts, animal crafts, decoration, painting, beading, gift making, gardening, felt crafts, puppets, play date tips, scrapbooking, yarn and needle crafts, photography, home decor, reading, poetry, jewelry making projects and science projects. About the author of the videos: My name is Merve, I am a Muslim, an engineer from New York, a mom, a wife and a crafter by nature. My parents introduced me to arts and crafts at a very early age. I love doing arts and crafts as a hobby but most importantly to …

Christmas holidays offer people a time to share joy both inside the home and out. Sometimes we forget how fun it is to look at Christmas decorations. Being able to share this joy with others is a wonderful experience. Yet often Christmas decorations can take both time and money. Here are some very affordable ways to share this seasons spirit and stay within your budget.

Many people have more stress during the holiday season.. Preparing for the arrival of family and other out of town guests can take a toll on you. With so much to worry about, your Christmas decorations shouldn’t be one of them. There are several cost efficient ways to decorate the exterior of your home without spending a bundle.

Ask yourself this question. What will be my theme? If you chose a traditional theme there may be items around your house for you to use. Items such as ribbon, scissors, tape, garland, and other materials are usually scattered about in drawers, closets and cabinets.

Try to use nature to help you decorate whenever possible. You can find holly berries, pine cones, branches and mistletoe almost everywhere. These items are free, earth friendly and they are so much fun to work with.

* Make your own evergreen trim; this requires a little bit of patience and practice. It will still beat paying $20 or more to purchase a living garland from the store. Just consider yourself to be the “Martha Stewart of the Forest”.

Other items that you may need for your Christmas decorating projects can be found at your local dollar store. You can also check out discounters and garage sales for necessities such as construction paper, artificial flowers, glue, lights, wreaths, bows, markers, colored pencils, paint, paper plates, glue sticks, Christmas bulbs, glitter, and all sizes of Styrofoam balls.

Make decorating fun. Make kid friendly decorations that are both eye- catching and cost efficient. Invite all your family members to participate in this kid-friendly project. Here are some easy to make crafts the whole family can enjoy doing.

* Make some life size ornament cutouts from posterboard and use them to decorate your door or porch. You can trim these cutouts with material from the craft store.

* Decorating trees and bushes with bows is colorful and affordable. Having all bows be the same color is recommended. It gives the yard a more “pulled together” appearance.

* Create some ornaments with ribbon and pine cones to hang on tree branches. If you add peanut butter and bird seed to the pine cones the birds will appreciate it.

* You can make your own luminaries at home. All you need for ice luminaries are some empty quart size milk containers or some large buckets. You can even make Christmas luminaries from some plain tin cans.

Tin Can Luminaries

1. Use clean tin cans of different sizes for this project. Make sure the cut top is smooth and safe. Remove the labels from the cans and fill them with water.

2. Place them in the freezer. The frozen water in the cans will prevent them from denting or collapsing as you create Christmas designs on their surfaces.

3. When you have solid ice in your tin cans, you can safely make designs using nails and a hammer. For fancier designs, a hole punch works great.

4. Be creative with your design and make sure the light will be able to shine through.

5. Remove the ice, place votive candles inside the cans and decorate your front walk, yard or porch.

Here is another idea that can be used to decorate the exterior of your home for Christmas.

Decorative Door Greeting

Items needed:

Garland in the following colors: green, silver, gold, red

Ribbon (red, green, silver, gold)

Tape (or thumb tacks)

Scissors

Fun and festive wrapping paper (Christmas themed)

Construction paper

Color pencils (or markers)

Glitter

Trim a piece of colorful wrapping paper so that it will fit the length of your front door.

Attach the wrapping paper to your door with either invisible tape (so there won’t be glue marks when you remove it) or thumb tacks.

Next you will need to cut two pieces of red and silver garland the width of the door.

Twist the garland together.

Cut ¾ inch green ribbon and tie the ends of the garland.

Cut two pieces of green and gold garland together. Cut ¾ inch silver ribbon and tie both ends of the garland.

Use a hook, thumb tacks or a small nail to mount the garland on your door.

Cut four pieces of garland, (your choice of colors) the height of the door.

Twist the first two pieces of the garland together.

Now you can twist the next two pieces of garland together.

Use thumb tacks to secure the garland in place on the door.

Making a Greeting Card for the Door

Fold the construction paper in half.

* Write a holiday greeting to people coming to your door on this card. Brightly colored markers or pencils work well for this.

* Using a brightly colored pen or a glitter pen to trace your greeting adds nice touch.

* Once you have finished the card, place it at the center of the door.

* For a different style, cover your door with cards. The cards can all be filled in – or you can include a pen so people can add their own message.

Learning how to decorate the exterior of your home for Christmas does not mean that you have to spend a lot of money. This should be a fun project that lets you add your personal style statement to the season’s festivities.

Christmas is one of the best times for surprises and cheerful, festive decorations can be a great time to make even more surprises. Adults and children alike enjoy making crafts, especially when the creations can be proudly displayed in the home. Many crafts can easily be made by almost anyone to decorate your home or given to friends and family for gifts. The time spent as a family making decorations can be very rewarding. Your family may enjoy it so much that you choose to make this a special tradition each year.

Once easy Christmas craft is to make a small table top tree. Begin with a foam cone which can be purchased at most any craft store or online. Cover the entire cone with double sided tape. You can adorn the tree with colorful beads, candies, pre-cut foam or paper shapes or any other item you can think of to attach to the tree. Make sure to cover the entire tree with your decorations and don’t forget your tree topper. You can cut and angel or star from construction paper.

Another simple Christmas craft is making popcorn garland. Kids love to make this craft and don’t be surprised if they try to sneak a piece of popcorn or two. Simply take a piece of string, about arm’s length, and thread a needle on one end and try a knot on the other end. Begin poking the needle into a piece of popcorn and pull it to the end of the string. Tie another not when the string is full. You can tie the garland together to make longer pieces to decorate your Christmas tree, fireplace mantle, doorways and more.

These two craft ideas can are so simple and inexpensive. You and your children will enjoy making these decorations and will delight in showing their creations off to all of your family and friends.

Children love the sense of creativity. When a guest appreciates something in the house and the child says, “I made it,” one can easily read that sense of pride and happiness in their eyes. Crafts are an easy means to pave way to your child’s creativity, innovative skills and thoughts. This Halloween, chalk out sometime guide your children through easy crafts and help them decorate their own room or the house.

It would be real fun working with your child and would also add to your festive mood. Here are some easy Halloween crafts that you can try with your children.

1. Pick out fun foam from the neighboring craft or department stores. Next buy a pack of sheets is varied shades like white, green, black and orange. Now, cut out oval & circular shapes in varied colors or paper.

On the World Wide Web that is the internet; look out for colorful Halloween images. Try searching bats, witches, black cats and skeletons. Take out prints of these images through a printer. You might need to reduce the size of the images so as to fit on to the base you have made. In case you are a good artist and can draw well, try drawing some images on your own! Now cut these images from contrasting shades of fun foam. Glue these on the shapes you had cut out. Now, punch a hole on the top and draw a string through this hole. Alas, hang the fun ornaments where ever you feel like!

2. You can also adapt ideas from some difficult crafts. Try hanging scary ghosts on your trees.

For this pick out an ordinary plastic bag from the near by grocery store. Now cut off its handles. In place of the head, place Styrofoam ball at the top. Secure it using a rubber band. Now, shred the bag’s bottom into strips. Above the head, poke a hole so as to insert a string to hang. Draw a scary face on the ball!

You can also make your ghost sing in the wind. Just attach some bells at the bottom of strips. This would b real fun!

3. Purchase some dark colored candles. Black would be a great option. Give your child interesting trinkets like candy corns, sequins, fun foam shapes, etc., just any vague things you get your hands on. Tell your child to glue those trinkets on the candles. Place them where ever you like in the house for some fun Halloween decoration!

Try these and apply your creativity to device more of such easy and interesting stuff for your kids!

Christmas is a holiday where all kinds of kids crafts are created at home and in the school environment. Crafts for kids, however should be an activity that should bring fun and excitement to children’s activities aside from adding a bonding to the adults that are doing the projects with them. Educational arts and crafts is a way of doing crafts with children where they are not blindly copying the adults model but are creating things that they are capable of creating at their own developmental level. When children create at their own level a number of things occur. It creates a great feeling about themselves, as who can feel good about crafts projects that are copycat models of someone else’s. Children who create their own projects without adult input feel much better about themselves. A further benefit educational arts and crafts gives children, is its allowance for so much more creativity. There is very little that represses creativity more than having to copy anothers work. Educational art encompasses a few different types of activities. There is the cafeteria style that allows children to choose materials to work with, there is process only art where the process is what counts along with a few more. The point of it is that all of the crafts under educational arts and crafts should be age appropriate, and allow for freedom of creation and expression. Below I will give you 2 clear cut, almost effortless Christmas craft ornaments that you can make. The first one uses plastic throwaway cups: The children will now love to color their cups using only permanent markers that work on plastic. Try to get the kids to cover up the cup with markers as much as they can. When they are done, take a cookie sheet and put the cups upside down on it and put in the over at around 350 degrees. Watch them melt in the oven for a few minutes until they are the right size that you like. Make sure you keep a close eye on them so they don’t totally burn up. The cups and the tray of course, get very hot so the children must be kept away until they cool. When they are cool, make a hole in the center and use colorful ribbon to hang as an ornament for your tree. For our next craft you will use any unused or not needed dvd’s or cd’s. Next step: Give the kids all types of things to decorate them with and them string them up on the tree. There are loads of ways to decorate the cd’s. You can color with permanent markers, glue and glitter them, collage over them, decoupage over them, and decorate them with whatever shiny, decorative materials you can find. Once they are done, get some pretty ribbon and hang them from your tree. If you want to see what a crafts acitivity done in the cafeteria style is like then check out this Hanukkah Crafts collage

Christmas is a holiday where all kinds of kids crafts are created at home and in the school environment.

 

 

Crafts for kids, however should be an activity that should bring fun and excitement to children’s activities aside from adding a bonding to the adults that are doing the projects with them.

 

 

Educational arts and crafts is a way of doing crafts with children where they are not blindly copying the adults model but are creating things that they are capable of creating at their own developmental level.

 

 

When children create at their own level a number of things occur.

 

 

It creates a great feeling about themselves, as who can feel good about crafts projects that are copycat models of someone else’s. When the crafts project is totally created by the kids themselves, it makes them feel much better about themselves.

 

 

Creativity is also a wonderful reason to switch to educational arts and crafts.

There is hardly anything more that cramps a child’s creativity than being expected to totally copy and adults rendition of a project.

 

 

There are between 4-6 kinds of art type of activites listed under educational art.

There is the cafeteria style that allows children to choose materials to work with, there is process only art where the process is what counts along with a few more.

 

 

The point of it is that all of the crafts under educational arts and crafts should be age appropriate, and allow for freedom of creation and expression.

 

 

Explained below are two simple and inexpensive Christmas crafts activities that you can make from items around your home.

 

 

The first one uses plastic throwaway cups:

 

 

Offer the kids permanent markers in many colors for them to decorate their cups. Encouraging the children to color all over the cup will make for a nicer ornament.

 

 

When they are done, take a cookie sheet and put the cups upside down on it and put in the over at around 350 degrees. Leaving them in the oven between 2-3 minutes will allow them to go down to a good size. Keep an eye on them so they don’t disintegrate in the oven. This part must be done by adults only as it gets very hot.

 

 

When they are cool, make a hole in the center and use colorful ribbon to hang as an ornament for your tree.

 

 

The second activity is a neat way to use all of your old, ready to throw away cd’s.

 

 

 

Next: Add lots of decorative materials and get them hung on the tree.

 

 

There so many methods of beautifying the cd’s.

 

 

You can color with permanent markers, glue and glitter them, collage over them, decoupage over them, and decorate them with whatever shiny, decorative materials you can find.

Once they are done, get some pretty ribbon and hang them from your tree.

 

If you want to see what a crafts acitivity done in the cafeteria style is like then check out this Hanukkah Crafts collage

May is the time to honor and thank mothers, grandmothers, and just-like-a-mom women in your circle of family and friends for all that they do in raising children. We have prepared some special Mother’s Day craft gift ideas and fun Mother’s Day-inspired activities to share with that special someone.

Thumbprint Note Cards

Cut a piece of paper to desired size (5 inches by 4 inches is a nice size) and fold in half. Have children place thumb or finger in a stamp pad and make 5 or 6 thumb or fingerprints on front of card. Draw stems and leaves with a green crayon or marker. Extension: Make 5 or 6 cards, tie together with a ribbon, and give as Mother’s Day present.

Hugs and Kisses

Provide children each with a small wooden or cardboard box. Have them paint their box. After the box is dry, let them decorate the box with markers, stickers, sequins, glitter, etc. Next, have children shred some paper (use a variety of colors) and fill the box with it. Have them add some Hershey’s Kisses, Hugs, or other candy. Finally have children attach the following poem to the box and then give it to their Mom for Mother’s Day.

This is a very special box

That’s just for you from me.

It’s filled with hugs and kisses

So you’ll always think of me.

Decorative Soap

Cut a piece of felt, decorative paper, or fabric to fit around a bar of soap. Wrap the material around the soap and glue. Let dry. Decorate the top and sides of the bar of soap with small silk flowers, ribbon, lace, sequins, beads, etc.

Heart Pendant

Mix together one cup flour, one cup warm water, one-fourth cup salt, 2 teaspoons cream of tartar, one teaspoon oil, and a few drops of food coloring. Roll out dough. Use a heart-shaped cookie cutter to cut out heart shapes. Poke a hole at the top of the heart big enough to thread yarn or ribbon through. Let dry. Paint heart. Spread a thin layer of glue on heart and sprinkle with glitter. Add sequins or small beads if desired. Thread the yarn or ribbon. Wrap in tissue paper or gift wrap.

Mother’s Day Party

Mother’s Day is a great reason to have a party with family and close friends. Get everyone together for a breakfast, picnic, brunch, garden party or barbecue. Include friends who are close to your mom if they are not celebrating with their own family, or combine the celebrations to honor all of the moms, grandmothers and just-like-a-mom women in your circle of family and friends.

Mother’s Day Activity Mom and I Booklet

Make a “Mom and I” booklet with your child. On the front cover, glue a picture of you and your child. On the next pages, help your child complete the following: Mom and I like to play __________. Mom and I like to eat __________. Mom and I like to go to __________. Mom and I like to read __________. Mom and I like to watch __________. Assemble the pages to make a booklet.

Mommy’s Little Helper

Mother’s Day is a great day for children to express how much they appreciate what Mom does for them. Encourage children to help Mom by doing things like dusting, folding laundry, watering plants, clearing the table, etc.

Whether the special woman in your life is your mom, grandmother, sister, or friend, I hope you’ll enjoy sharing our Mother’s Day inspired crafts and handmade Mother’s Day cards, games, and activities with that special someone.