Entertaining a toddler can be challenging at the best of times. But during a pandemic, in isolation, without easy access to supplies, or a garden? It was…. Yikes.
We, as a family, put our best creative hats on and dreamt up 26 ‘isolation creations’ that you could also make at home with your little ones.
While we made this list, below, and created the crafts during summer 2020, we asked followers to donate whatever they could, to encourage our efforts / if they appreciated the inspiration – anything from 26p to £26, or whatever they could, (as part of the London Marathon 2.6 challenge), to the charity, NSPCC (the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children).
This summer, we choose to support the NSPCC once more, by spending two days ‘playing’, in celebration of the charity’s first ever flagship day: ‘Childhood Day‘. After the year we have had, during the Coronavirus pandemic, we could all do with some playtime.
I work at the NSPCC, so experience first-hand how vital the funds raised are, and how they are used to help be there for children. You can help us fight for every childhood and donate to our Childhood Day fundraising page, now, in support of our efforts – we will be having a fancy dress and garden games party on the 15th of May 2021, and a fancy dress mini disco on Childhood Day itself on the 11th June, 2021. Or why not set up your own ‘play day’ or ‘play event’, to do some fundraising of your own? And let’s get the nation playing, again!
Here are the craft ideas, to get the creative inspiration, flowing:
- A cardboard robot costume – making the most of all those cardboard lockdown delivieries!
- Baking carrot and raisin muffins – Annabel Karmel recipe, easy and delicious
- Cardboard loo roll binoculars
- A paper picture scene – place for all those stickers!
- Building a den
- Chalk drawings
- Adventures in glitter – only for the brave (or those with a hoover…)
- Make a Playdoh rainbow, which can then become sausages in a pan/wiggly worms etc
- Painting stones
- Make, bake and paint salt dough
- Freeze plastic toys in water in a tub, then have great fun smashing or melting them out!
- Print painting with dried fruit halves
- Rainbow hand painting
- Making book characters out of Playdoh
- Make a theatre out of a cereal box
- Melt chocolate in a bow and dip in fruit kebabs
- Make and paint a cardboard ‘Tiger who came to tea’, and set up for a surprise breakfast!
- Learn about emotions by drawing faces on bits of cards and use with a figure or doll
- Cut out body parts from magazines and group together to learn about the body
- A positive poem board – make and fill in the blanks!
- Make a fruit smoothie
- Papier-mâché hot air balloon
- Make a sourdough pizza
- ‘Hang out the washing’ – pegging dolls clothes on a ribbon line
- Draw around your child and cut out the template on cardboard, then decorate
- Make a cardboard box boat. Ours was inspired by Oliver Jeffrey’s stories abut the penguin. Tie a ribbon to pull around on adventures – if your back is up to it
SIGN UP TO TAKE PART IN CHILDHOOD DAY 2021, HERE, NOW!
[The NSPCC is the leading children’s charity fighting to end child abuse in the UK and Channel Islands. We help children who have been abused to rebuild their lives, protect those at risk, and find the best ways of preventing abuse from ever happening. Every child deserves the best possible chance to rebuild their life after abuse. That’s why we’re here. That’s what drives all our work. And that’s why – as long as there’s abuse – we will fight for every childhood.]