Eco-friendly Crafting with Kids

Spring vacations and even summer vacation are soon upon us. I know there are days when I hear the inevitable "I'm booooored." Now I know to have an arsenal of activities up my sleeve. Rain? No problem! We can craft now. Our favorite is Eco-Friendly Crafting with Kids by Kate Lilley.

Kate Lilley's hugely popular blog, Minieco, chronicles her adventures in crafting with her two small sons. In Eco-Friendly Crafting with Kids, she presents 35 bold, colourful and ingenious new projects especially designed for preschool children up to and including the age of five. Starting with Homemade Materials, learn how to make basics such as play dough, chalk and crayons. In Music, create musical instruments then enjoy getting noisy with them afterwards! Nature reveals fun ways to get in touch with the natural world, while Recycling Bin has ideas for making a kaleidoscope or a robot costume from discarded cardboard tubes and boxes. Paper and Card features paper-crafting projects that involve snipping and sticking, while Sewing and Threading projects will help develop fine motor skills. Science is packed with messy stuff that kids will love, such as homemade gloop and magic potions. The final section contains 50 boredom busters for parents to pull out of the bag in an emergency. Every project is explained in clear step-by-step instructions accompanied by easy-to-follow photography, showing exactly how to create these gorgeous, rainbow-bright toys and games.

I usually mark the pages of a book for the activities we will want to try, but I soon realized with Eco-Friendly Crafting with Kids that I wanted to make every single thing. We have been crafting warriors since we got this. My husband made the cardboard box guitar with my daughter. She loves it!
We have made our own playdough which we dyed with red cabbage and tumeric. We conducted a red cabbage and lemon experiment to talk about color-change.

My personal favorite was making our own watercolor paints with natural egg dyes and using old bottlecaps for the containers. They are amazing and so fun.
I love that every craft is so easy to do and that most of the items are found around your home helping you to reuse and recycle them. Gotta go, more crafting to be done!