Making Art for your Child's Room

It's been almost a year since we moved to Pretoria, but I wanted to share this post with you, as old as it is. Before moving out of our home last year, I did many things to fix up the house. One of those chores was to finalise a nice wall of art in Little One's room. His room was definitely one of my favourites in the house. The light in this room was beautiful and of course, who can resist children's decor?

So using the art work from free printable packs, provided by the wonderful blogs Homeschool Creations and 1+1+1=1, as well as some other ideas, I made all the art for the wall myself.

  

One very easy idea is to cut out the first letter of your child's name from black craft paper and then using Tipp-Ex or white paint, turn it into a road. Stick on some toy cars, preferably plastic ones if you can find them, with a nice strong glue. I used light plastic cars from a popular old game. I took the glass out of the frame, so that I could stick the cars directly onto the cardboard. The poster next to the "S", as well as the two yellow framed pictures, were made from the art work in the printable packs, as mentioned above.

In this picture below you can see how I created the Bus and Taxi. Adding photo faces of our family members made it fun and personal. 

I love how it turned out and Little One and I spent some great creative time sitting at that little white table.

I also love that it didn't cost lots of money to make a great wall of art. 

Do you have some personal walls of art in your home?


PS. Here's a link to all the other posts I've written about homemade wall art - Wall Art Ideas. Just in case you like the topic. :)

C is for Car

Earlier this year I kind of promised you an alphabet series. One should never promise such things. The year has raced on and Little One will be going into his last term of the school year tomorrow. The spring holidays are over, sniff, sniff. On the upside, it's count down to the Christmas holidays. 

I have shared these in the series so far:

A is for Astronaut

O is for Octopus

S is for The Very Busy Spider

I'm not very far, am I.  

Let's see if I can catch up a bit.

Little One won an awesome prize at his school carnival and this week we went down to the Zwartkops Race Track and both boys got the opportunity to race around the track with racing driver George Smallberger. It was such a cool afternoon.

Perfect timing for this post. So here I share not only our car activities, but also some pictures of our afternoon.

This cute letter "c" idea is from this post.

These are inspired by these Teddy Racing Cars. 

(I used small Bar Ones, Smarties and some icing.)

A chocolate traffic light treat, or robot, as we call them here in South Africa. 

(Kit Kat, small Bar Ones, Smarties and icing.)

Both my boys (aged 6 and 12) loved creating this car banner for the bookshelf.

If you children love drawing, creating a banner is a great boredom buster.

 

Little One in the car, all ready to go. 

  

Those little fingers make me smile. 

 Can you spot him?

Another alphabet post coming up soon. 

Till next time. 

Car Painting

Little One had fun one afternoon painting with some of his cars. 

The paint can be tricky to clean off the wheels, so if your little guy wants to paint with his favourite car, you may need to prepare him for multicoloured tyres after the art. :)

Have fun!

(PS. This is not an original idea and I like to give credit where it is due, but unfortunately I cannot recall where I saw this for the first time. If it's your idea - please let me know.)

Felt Car Play Mat

So one day I was surfing and I found this! It's an amazing car mat from Kimbo at her blog called A girl and a glue gun. Don't you just love the name of her blog? I do, 'cause I'm also crazy about my glue gun. After seeing Kimbo's mat, I was very inspired to make my own version for Little One. Mine is not nearly as elaborate as hers, but I was happy with the way it turned out.

Now you would think that I have a very happy little boy who loves playing with his car mat... well, not really. Every time I put it out to play, he crumples it up within minutes. I quickly realised that he doesn't like that the felt sometimes moves when he drives his cars on it. I have played with it too and found it to be fine, but I suppose when you are only 2 years old, these things can be a bit more frustrating :). If you have any good suggestions for keeping the mat flat and steady, please feel free to comment.

On another topic for a moment...can you spot some very cool toys on our mat. There are a variety of brands being played with here, but some of them are from the "WOW" range of toys and have been loved and played with by both my boys. If you don't know the range, they have an awesome website that you can visit here. They are really great quality and tough toys that can take a beating.

For more amazing play mat inspiration be sure to visit these blogs too:

Arctic and Jungle mats at Shady Tree Diary

Dinosaur play mat at Serving Pink Lemonade

Bob the Builder and Thomas the Train mats at My Delicious Ambiguity

Car and Animal play mats at lovely little sweetpeas

Happy playing.

PS. I'm linking this to:
Get Your Craft On @ TODAY'S creative Blog 

MADE BY LITTLE HANDS MONDAY @ delicate CONSTRUCTION

We Play @ childhood101  
Making the World Cuter Monday  
HIGH PAW @ the best toys for toddlers 

Colour Fun #5 - A Colour Car Play Mat

Little One loves playing with cars and so I thought this would be a fun and novel way to teach colours and to match-up colours. I made the play mat out of cardboard (a big cereal box) and covered it with a piece of black cardboard and then covered that with colour squares. Simple! 

I plan on leaving it out next to his cars and occasionally modelling  the cars parking in the correctly matched parking spaces. If you do make this for your little one, please come back and tell me how it was received.

PS. I am linking this to It's Playtime, Tot Tuesdays @ My Delicious Ambiguity and ABC and 123 Show and Tell.

Colour Fun #2 - "Red Car, Red Car, What Do You See?"

I love to share good things and the website that I'm sharing with you today is GREAT! Shelley at childcareland.com has created wonderful learning activities for early childhood educators and the best of all is that she has lots of free printables here.

To continue with our colour fun this week, I want to share a free printable that I downloaded from Shelley's site. Now in my previous post on Colour Fun (which you can read here), I told you about the book "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see?". This printable is based on the book, but instead of animals, there are different colour cars. The little rhyme becomes "Red car, red car, what do you see? I see a ____ car looking at me."

Here is the link for you to make your own set.

Red Car, Red Car, What do you see?

If you have a little girl and don't want to make a car set, there is a bird set available too.

Pink Bird, Pink Bird, What do you see?

I printed these out, stuck them onto cardboard (recycled boxes) and then covered them with clear sticky plastic. You could also laminate them. My first intention was to turn this into a felt board game for Little One, so I stuck sandpaper on the back of the cards to make it stick to the felt. Little One showed no interest in this, so I added magnetic strips to the back and converted them to fridge magnets. That definitely got more of his attention. I must tell you that he ruined a few of them very quickly. I only turned my back for a minute or so and some had been bent rather badly. The best part is I can simply remake them.

Some colour fishy fun coming up in the next post.