Rainy Day Projects

Space Arts & Crafts for kids

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

Part of Space activities and all arts & crafts.

No-prep ideas for this

Something to say right now while you get the space set out — or instead of it. All the quick ideas.

  • Invent a language — three words minimum — and teach it to me when you're ready.

    Make up a language that no one on Earth has ever heard. Decide how to say hello, goodbye, and one other word. Practice saying all three until they sound right, then teach them to the adult.

    15 minutes · Ages 5–10 · Light adult help · No mess · Needs nothing

  • Count down from twenty and launch your moonbase mission.

    You are the mission commander on a moonbase. Count down from twenty, then act out the launch. Once in space, describe three problems that come up and solve each one out loud before returning safely to Earth.

    30 minutes · Ages 3–8 · Adult alongside · No mess · Needs nothing

    Make more of it: Moonbase Mission Control Blanket Fort →

  • Design the inside of a spaceship — every room — and label what each one does.

    Design a spaceship on paper — draw every room inside it and label what each room is for. Include at least one room the adult would not expect.

    15 minutes · Ages 8–10 · Kids can run it · Low mess · Needs: paper, pencil

    Make more of it: Tabletop Solar System Orrery →

Space Arts & Crafts at home

Space has a particular pull on children because it is genuinely real and genuinely enormous — and arts and crafts let them get their hands on something that otherwise exists only in photographs or on screens. These three projects work because the materials themselves carry the theme: dark paper becomes a sky that actually looks like a sky, a cardboard tube is already almost a rocket, and a painted ball hanging on a string is unmistakably a planet. You end up with something to keep and point at, not just an activity that disappears when you tidy up. For parents, that finished object does a second job: it holds the child's attention past the point where a game or a video would have lost it.

What is in this set

The three space Arts & Crafts activities here run from 25 to 75 minutes — Torn-Paper Night Sky Collage is the quickest, Painted Solar System Mobile the longest. Between them they cover ages 3–5, ages 5–8 and ages 8–10, and each card below says which. Each one wants an adult at least nearby.

Choosing one

For a three- to five-year-old with limited table time and no scissors, start with the Torn-Paper Night Sky Collage — it is done in under half an hour and the tearing itself is the entertainment. The Cardboard Tube Rocket with Fins suits a five- to eight-year-old who wants to build something three-dimensional and play with it afterward. If you have forty-five minutes and do not mind paint cleanup, it is the most replayable of the three. The Painted Solar System Mobile is the one to reach for when an eight- to ten-year-old wants a project with real information in it and something worth hanging on the wall.

Before you start

Across all three projects, the single most useful thing you can do before calling the child over is cover the work surface — newspaper or an old plastic bag taped flat takes thirty seconds and prevents the majority of complaints later. For the Night Sky, pre-glue the dark background. For the Rocket, have the tube standing ready and fins pre-cut to size. For the Mobile, pre-crumple and tape all eight planet balls. The thing that goes wrong most often across all three is paint drying time: children want to handle the piece before the tempera is actually dry. Build in a five-minute wait between painting and the next step, and have something small to do in the meantime.

More space activities

The other formats available for this theme.

This site uses Google Analytics. See our Privacy Policy. The picker and your list keep saved items in this browser’s local storage — not a cookie, and nothing is sent anywhere.