Directions to Make Easy Crafts

by Wendy Adams

Overview

Crafting inspires creativity, teaches skills, opens the imagination and teaches a child self-expression. Crafts are easy to make with household items, found items or scraps of fabrics and paper. You can make fun, decorative crafts such as party hats, holiday decorations and toys. Useful items can be crafted for teaching aids. Easy-to-make crafts are great rainy-day solutions for the kids or a class lesson for the home-schooled child.
Rock Buddies

On your next walk with your child, collect a few smooth rocks for a fun craft project. Cover the painting area with newspaper (table and floor) and use a paper or plastic place mat on top of the newspaper. Acrylic paint is the best choice for this project because it dries quickly with a shiny surface and requires no clear coat or varnish to finish the surface. Create a palette on a paper plate by putting small amounts of different colors of acrylic paint around the plate's edges. Using an art brush, paint the top and sides of the rock, let it dry, then turn it over and paint the other side. Depending on the age of the child, you can paint the rock with a happy face, create a ladybug, a spider, favorite cartoon character, fried eye or doughnut paperweight. This craft project is all about a child's imagination.

Egg Carton Caterpillar

Use scissors to cut a row of four to six egg cups from an egg carton. Using the point of your scissors, poke two holes in the first egg cup for antennas. Cut two pieces of pipe cleaner 3 inches long each. Insert the pipe cleaner antenna into the holes. Bend 1/4 inch of each pipe cleaner inside the egg carton to secure it to the body. On the outside, bend the antenna back a little. You can put a small curl in the end of each antenna. Use a marker to draw two eyes and a smile or glue on googly eyes, buttons or beads for eyes. Use different colored markers or crayons to decorate the caterpillar.
Easy Paper Plate Clock

Use a marker to put a dot in the center of the paper plate. Begin to number the clock with a marker, starting with 12, 3, 6, 9, and then adding the other numbers. Cut the clock hands from construction paper, making sure to cut a long hand and a short hand. Poke a paper fastener into the end of the short hand then the long hand. With the hands attached by the fastener, poke the fastener through the paper plate at the center dot and bend back the ends to secure. You can decorate the plate with paint, crayons or markers before assembling the clock. This is an ideal way to teach a child to tell time.

Overview