akiko's activity ideas with your 7 year old!

Here's a wonderful entry by Akiko on my Scribble and Smudge team.

Art activities to do with your 7 year old.

Half term activities

So another half term has come and gone and like most parents I try to fill the days with interesting and varied activities!  My daughter aged 7 was keen on staying in and “doing art”, here are some activities that we occupied ourselves with.  They are all low cost and simple so I hope you will find them useful!

1.     Family tree decoration

Materials: card, wire or string, beads, pen/pencil, scissors and hole punch

This started life as a key ring.  Well that was the idea... that my daughter had - and I simplified!  Originally we thought of attaching a disc to a chain but knowing that the artwork would probably be short lived if attached to keys, we made it into a hanging decoration.  Take a sheet of card and cut out discs, then decorate.  We decided that each family member would contribute, so starting from the top, daughter, me and Dad.  We then covered the discs with sticky back plastic and punched holes so wire could be threaded through for the circles to hang down.  One point to note – probably best to hole punch before designing, I was told off for punching through the eagle's beak!!

The design could include extended family members and pictures of pets too!

2.     Beads

Simple but effective, all you need are shop bought beads (Tiger has nice ones that include clasps for jewellery) and thread.  Often the sets come with nylon thread that can be awkward to work with, we used special beading thread that has a coating that allows for easy threading and is strong/non-stretchy.  You can get this from most art/craft shops.  A word of warning, a blob of glue where the knot is made on the clasp helps, otherwise the beads can pull on the knot and unravel (speaking from experience...)

3.     Firework picture

This idea came about when we were reading a story about a box of crayons....

All the brightly coloured crayons are having fun drawing but then they start scribbling all over each other...the black crayon saves the day and restores peace by covering over the colours and, aided by a friendly mechanical pencil makes a beautiful picture of the night sky with fireworks.  To recreate this, all you need is a box of crayons or pastels, use lots of different colours to cover a sheet of paper, then cover with black crayon or pastel (pastel over crayon seems to work best).  Then take something with a point, a skewer works well, to draw your motifs and “dig up” the colours beneath the black.  This would also work as a snowscape – use white pastel over the coloured crayon.

Hope these are useful ideas and you have fun, we certainly did!

Akiko