Arts & Crafts for kids at home

Paper, glue, paint, and recycled-material projects with a finished thing to keep.

42 activities across 14 themes. Pick a theme to see the set.

Arts & Crafts at home

Arts and crafts at home means sitting alongside your child while something gets made — and keeping that thing afterward. These activities use paper, cardboard, glue, and paint, with recycled materials standing in wherever a kit might otherwise be needed. You will tear paper, mix colors, score folds, and steady things while small hands work. The finished objects range from a flat collage, like the Torn-Paper Barn Collage for younger children, to a three-dimensional object like the Cardboard Box Construction Vehicle, to something as precise as the Layered Paper-Cut Undersea Diorama for older kids. The themes exist because a child who is deep into dinosaurs needs a different starting point than one who is planning a birthday party.

What is here

There are 42 arts & Crafts activities on the site so far, in 14 sets of three: four for a situation (Rainy Day, Snow Day, Sick Day and Birthday Party) and ten built around a world your child is into (Dinosaurs, Space, Ocean, Animals, Farm, Jungle & Safari, Pirates, Castles & Knights, Superheroes and Construction & Trucks). Every set has one activity for each age band where the format allows it, and the card on each set says how long it takes. Most arts & Crafts activities are marked “light adult help”, so plan on that when you pick one. The themes are listed in the order they appear on the homepage.

How to use these

Pick a theme that matches your child's current interest, then look at the age band on each card — it tells you how much fine motor control and patience the steps assume, not whether your child is allowed to try. If you have an afternoon, start with a torn-paper activity, since tearing requires no scissors and almost no setup, then move to a second project while the glue from the first one dries. Before you sit down, pull out a sheet of newspaper to protect the table, gather any paint or glue you own, and set out scrap paper and cardboard. Everything else the card lists, you either already have or can skip.

Other kinds of activity

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