Non-crafty but want to encourage my child

[RomanCarmelMom]

I am probably one of the world's least artistic mothers. However, I want to encourage my son to be crafty and creative. He'll be 3 years old this Fall. Other than coloring, drawing, and play dough, what crafts can I do with him?

[summermay]

Me too.
I happened to search a bit on the you tube websites. If you look for "easy painting for children" easy or foolproof anything arts, there are plenty of great clips. I think I can start the adventure of knitting soon...

[mazajo]

My DS is a little older (he'll be 4 in Sept) but lately he's really into glueing and making collages. He'll tear up a little bits of colored paper to glue in neat looking designs, or gather leaves and twigs and stuff outside to make a nature collage. Glue sticks keep the mess under control.

Painting is great because there's so much room for variety. You can paint with different sorts of paint or even shaving cream or pudding (DS's favorite!). You can paint with your fingers or paintbrushes or sponges or Qtips or old toothbrushes. You can paint on plain paper or colored paper and you can paint rocks and so much stuff.

I love family fun for craft ideas. Some are more complicated, but a lot are pretty basic.

[rootzdawta]

I don't consider myself crafty either even though I knit and crochet. Crafty things that I can handle . . .

1. Printmaking--using styrofoam plates
2. Cutting and gluing . . . glue is really great for the not so crafty incliined . . . providing all kinds of interesting paper to cut up and glue on cardstock, gluing cotton balls, feathers, felt, etc . . .
3. origami (I borrow books from the library)

Otherwise, I just try to take him to arts and crafts programs at local libraries.

[Mama Shifra]

Earthways: Simple Environmental Activities for Young Children by Carol Petrash is great and full of ideas.

[caiesmommy]

Ds(almost 3) loves to glue and stick things. Hates coloring books! He draws on the back of the cover where it's plain white

We:

-cut scrap computer paper(stuff printed on one side, usually dh's old set lists) into seasonal shapes, trees, butterflys, trains, cars whatever. Then we use scrap tissue paper, scrap yarn, scrap fabric, pictures frm magazines and stickers to decorate them..the fam looks forward to ds season picture
-egg carton flowers, bells, caterpillar, spiders. My mil has a boquet of egg carton flowers in a silver vase lol...and we're in the process of making a whole bunch of bugs to hang in the play area(of course you need to really help to make them look like bugs We don't get many of these b/c we buy our eggs on a flat, and return the flats as we buy new. So they are leftover from the farmers markets off season, or from mil
- made music shakers out of t.p rolls. If you look here it gives you a whole list of characters you can print out and glue onto tp rolls to make puppets. Dc can color in the pictures and you can glue if your worried about the mess.

http://www.dltk-kids.com/type/tp_roll.htm

WE're also in the process of collecting containers to make these to also hang in the windows of the play area:
http://www.enviromom.com/2009/02/mak...lamshells.html
It's taking awhile b/c we don't buy many clamshells since we can't recycle them, so we're getting all of ours from mil. But we're pretty excited!
-made bird houses out of strawberry containers(dont know if the birds dugthem though, we never saw any Bird feeders out of pine cones, peanut butter and bird seed to hang from our trees in the winter
-I'm hoping this winter to make snow globes, w dd's baby food jars. It'll take quite a bit of help but I think he'll love them.

craft supplies can be crazy expensive, I use what I have around the house. Then when I'm out thrift shopping I ALWAYS look in the craft section. I just bought a huge bag of ribbon atleast 12 spools of different lengths for a $1. I keep the ones long enough to wrap presents and store the smaller strips for crafts. I also got a big bag of fabric scraps for quilting-again kept what I wanted the rest went to ds for $2. One craft supply we have that I LOVe is our scissors my dad's gf's son gave us his old craft scissors all the different groves make little pattern on the paper...no matter how "boring" the craft is ds just loves cutting with the scissors. We just made basket filler out of those annoying cupons that come in the envelope(for things like maids services, free delivery on 400 worth of lumber...annoying) and since we used those cool scissors ds had a blast.

[Ifluffedthree]

Ceramic clay.
Pinch pots
Coil Pots

lots of things to encourage imagination with clay. Cheap and easy and do it outside for quick clean ups.

Love me some clay -- a craft for all ages.