Invitation to Create: Watercolor Rats

Hi everyone! Just stopping in to share another super easy kids Chinese New Year Art and Craft Activity! Last week we made these adorable Rat Paper Cuttings. Today we're going to celebrate the Lunar New Year with these easy Watercolor rats!

Inviting Kids to Create: Watercolor Rats

Pop-Up Paper Plate Rainbows

It's been raining a lot! And while we need the rain, I do miss sunny days and blue skies.  Last week was filled with grey skies, so we cheered ourselves up with these pop-up paper plate rainbows.  Rainbow crafts are some of our favorites and this easy one was a lifesaver!

Let's Paint Paper Plate Rainbows with Kids!

Chinese New Year Pig Watercolor Paintings

Did you know that this Chinese New Year is the year of the pig?  A couple of nights ago my boys and I began making our annual Chinese New Year Crafts together.  One of my good friends is an art teacher and she painted some lovely pigs with her students.  I loved her idea so much that I wanted to try the activity out with my two boys too.  (Thanks, Alicia for the awesome idea!!!!)

Tada!  We all had fun trying our hand at painting some watercolor pigs for Chinese New Year!

Painting Watercolor Pigs for Chinese New Year!

(Can you guess which one my preschooler painted?  He fully enjoyed himself and got immensely messy!)

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Family Watercolor Heart Banners (and our 6 Favorite Valentine's Crafts)

This super sweet watercolor heart banner is a great Valentine's Craft celebrating the entire family.  During a recent playdate, I had the preschoolers make their own heart banners for their family.  The children enjoyed painting, gluing, and identifying all the members in their family.  Here's how we made this craft.

Family Watercolor Heart Banner

Painting on an Icy Snowman

Looking for a fun, winter-themed kid activity? Try painting an ice snowman.  This is a perfect activity for kids who are stuck inside and looking for something creative to do!

How To Make an Ice Snowman (and Paint It Too!)

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Kids Paint Watercolor Geodes

Love staring at geodes?  Do agates make your heart pitter patter?  We recently attended a rock and crystal themed birthday party (cool idea, right?) and we had fun "painting" these super simple "watercolor" geodes for our birthday card. 

Wait a moment.  Why am I putting everything in quotations?  Well, keep reading to find out! (Spoiler alert- No watercolors were used!)

Let's "Paint*" Geode cards with Kids

(*No fancy watercolors needed for this fun kid craft!)

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Giant, Pretty, Painted Origami Butterflies

Are there butterflies fluttering around your neighborhood?  We are currently enjoying Spring and all the colorful flowers and insects outside.  Today's post shares a quick spring craft for all you butterfly and origami enthusiasts.   We're making these lovely painted origami butterflies!

Giant Origami Painted Butterflies

Note:  This post contains affiliate links.  This means I make a small bit of change when you purchase items through the links.  Thank you for your support and the grocery money! For my full disclosure policy, click here.

Pretty Zentangle Flower Art

Spring has finally sprung in our neck of the woods.  Flowers are blooming and everything looks bright and beautiful. Wheeee!  Inspired by the gorgeous weather and an amazing wave art project that I saw on IG, today I'm sharing a pretty, flower-themed kids art project.  These zentangle flowers were very relaxing to doodle and the bright colors make the final results stunning! 

Pretty Zentangle Flower Art

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Watercolor Painted Paper Lanterns (with Jellyfish too!)

I am a sucker for kids watercolor art and crafts.  They're colorful, easy to set up, easy to clean up, and give us such bright and happy results.  (Plus, who doesn't love watching colors blend with one another?  It's pure magic.)  Today I'm pulling out another watercolor craft that will look just beautiful decorating your home this summer.  Tada!  We're painting some paper lanterns!

Kids Map Art- Creating with kids!

If you're looking for an easy art project to do with your kids, this is it.  I love finding cheap treasures from the thrift store and using them to make art with my family.  Here's our most recent project- a painted wooden map.

3D "I Love You" Hand Craft (And our Favorite Books about Love)

It's already February and I haven't yet put up any Valentine's Day Crafts this year.  Oof! What kind of kid crafter am I?

I've just been so caught up in what's happening in our country and world that I haven't fully had the heart or energy to embrace doilies, flowers, chocolate, hearts.... basically anything Valentine's yet.  But today I'm turning a new leaf.  Here's my first Valentine's day craft of the season... these 3D "I Love You" Hands.

(They're not quite hearts and flowers and pun-ny sayings.. but it's a start, right?)

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Gorgeous, Kid-Made Birthday Banner (And my dream job...)

A few weeks ago, we invited a few school friends over for a play date.  Since having a baby less than a year ago, I've been a bit (ok... let's be honest... VERY) nervous about having people over.  I'm always pooped and don't really feel like entertaining.  (Ever feel that way too?)  But, I pushed myself to try and that's how I found myself with 5 kids running around our fairly small home.  The kids played with toys and ran around outside... and surprisingly a lot of time was spent inside, painting and making art.

What?

You read that right, friends.  Our teacher's birthday was coming up and I invited the children to help me paint her birthday banner.  Once the kids saw the papers and art supplies on our table... they got right to work, creating the beautiful birthday letters below.

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Easy Pop Up Paper Plate Nativity

What do you get when you combine a Paper plate craft with a Christmas craft?  Ok... well, a lot of things come to mind... but today I'm sharing one idea.  It's a super easy paper plate Nativity craft. This craft is so quick to set up and make that you can do it with several kids at once.  (Ooh.  Wouldn't this be neat for Sunday school?  Church?  A playdate? ) And this craft is so easy that even young preschoolers could make them too.

So let's get started!

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Dip Dye Kids Art Project

If you're looking for the easiest, funnest, cheapest, and most colorful kids summer art project... you're at the right place.  We've been dying up a storm over here and turning plain old paper towels into lovely dip dye art!

How to Make Dip Dye Art With Kids

Family Watercolor Hand print Art

I'm always a bit nervous about transitions in life.  And having a new baby has certainly been a humongous transition for our whole family.  Diapers, giggles, crying, baby snuggles... we're still trying to find our new groove as a family of four.  So I came up with this hand print art project to do with my eldest son.  Despite all the crazy chaos that this stage of life brings, I still wanted to celebrate our family.

Family Watercolor Hand Print Art  

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Tape Resist Dinosaur Bone Art (And our favorite 10+ Dinosaur Books!)

I love it when an art and science combine to create a beautiful and easy kids STEM project. When I was growing up science, math, and art were always treated as fairly different topics.  And I get why they taught us that way... it's easier and we get to dig down deep into each one.  But I wish that my kid self also experienced how all three things topics were linked.  Don't artist use math and science when making art?  Isn't there beauty in math and science? Certainly!  And so my inner nerd and artist gets very excited when my son and I do a project that touches on what seem to be different areas.

Ok... but I digress.  Recently my son and I visited our local natural history museum's dinosaur exhibit and marveled at the size and design of t-rex bones.  (Gosh.  Those are some ferocious creatures!  So glad they don't live today.  Eeek.)  So, inspired by that visit and this awesome human skeleton tape resist painting idea, we made our own very beautiful and scientific tape resist dinosaur bone skeleton paintings! 

Tape Resist Dinosaur Bone Paintings 

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100 Color Challenge

Ever wonder just how big 100 really is?  Lately my son and I have been talking about numbers.  While small numbers are easy to imagine... large numbers always seem quite vague.  100?  1,000?  1,000,000?  10,000,000?  We just don't have much experience dealing with numbers larger than 20 in the real world.  So I came up with this really easy combination math activity and art activity.  We challenged ourselves to make 100 colors together!

100 Color Challenge!

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30+ Awesomely Unique and Fun Paper Plate Crafts for Kids!

It's no secret that I LOVE paper plate crafts!   Wanna make my heart sing?  Hand me a bunch of blank paper plates.  Seriously.  No joke. (Ok- Crafter confessional here- I've even snuck interesting paper plates out of parties before to craft with... shhhh... )

If you follow me on Instagram you'll see that I'm this week's #kidscrafts101 judge! Yup!  Every week there's a fun challenge to craft with a different material.  This week's theme is... drum roll please... paper plates! I know all of you and your kids have such creative ideas, so I'd love to see your ideas on IG!  (Just use the #kidscrafts101 so I can see your great ideas!)

And in honor of this week's theme, I thought I'd also share my absolute favorite paper plate crafts!

30+ Super Fun and Unique Paper Plate Crafts for Kids!

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Pi Day Inspired String Art Activity

Ah, good old Pi Day.  That special holiday only celebrated by geeky math and pizza lovers.  It's definitely my kind of holiday!  Today I'm adding to our list of easy, low-prep Pi Day Activities with this neat one that combines art and math.  Tada!  We're making some Pi Day inspired String Art!

Pi Day String Art Actvitiy

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Colorful 3D Paper Plate Fish Craft (and our 10 Favorite Fish Books!)

Today I've got another unique paper plate craft to add to our ever growing list of paper plate crafts.  Recently I transformed several paper plates into beautiful 3D fish.  Then, my son and I got to work painting them with all the vibrant colors of the rainbow!

Awesomely colorful, 3D Paper Plate Fish

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