Looking for fun and productive ways to spend time with your kids? Check out these 4 creative and engaging DIY home projects that both your little ones and you will surely enjoy:
- Bake cookies
It’s fun, it’s educational, and it ends up with everyone enjoying a warm and fresh batch of cookies. How can anyone resist?
More than just about preparing yummy treats, baking is an excellent way for parents to teach the little ones their way around the kitchen. The steps involved demonstrate basic yet practical mathematical and scientific concepts. Baking also helps develop fine motor skills, patience, and discipline.
- Make stuff
Help your kids make their own play dough. You’ll need just four ingredients – flour, salt, water, and natural food coloring – to ensure hours of fun. Plus, the kids will have a blast making it, as much as they will playing with it after.
Put an end to your kids’ perennial downtime complaint by creating a boredom jar. Help them figure out new activities they’d have fun doing and write them down on pieces of brightly colored paper. Add a few suggestions of your own if you’d like them to try out new things. The next time they’re antsy, let them draw from the jar.
- Introduce them to gardening
Tap into your kids’ innate curiosity and encourage an appreciation for the outdoors by introducing them to your garden. The garden is an ideal place to develop important life skills such as patience, long-term care, and learning by doing. It offers your kids a firsthand experience of how nature works.
To get started, create separate, small garden beds or containers that your children can claim and take care of as their own. Teach them the basics and keep them engaged throughout the growing process, but also be ready to do some behind-the-scenes help, especially for the less pleasant tasks like pruning, weeding, and cleaning up.
Another practical garden project you can do with the kids is creating a home-made bug trap. Hop on the internet to dig up DIY trap designs that use common household items like old plastic bottles and unused bowls to take care of those pesky garden pests.
- Craft colorful home décor
Want to spruce up your living spaces with some home-made projects? Try these fun ways to create nifty, personalized decorations for your living room, bedrooms, and more.
- Jars of color
Invite your kids to help out when you clean up your driveway or yard. Tell them to collect fallen leaves, twigs, and pebbles and to pack these into old mason jars or bottles. The jars can be charming ornaments for your desks, dining tables, and fireplace mantels.You and your kids can get crafty, too, using paint, glitter, and paper cutouts to add more color, based on a chosen theme or the time of year.
- Dart painting
What you’ll need: A nice blank canvas, washable paints, small balloons and a balloon pump, and toy darts.What you’ll do: Fill the balloons with a small amount of paint and air, pin or tape the balloons on the canvas, and pop the balloons with a game of darts. You’ll end up a unique family-made masterpiece to hang on your walls after you finish.
- Jars of color
Hot Illinois Homes has more great tips to make the best out of home living in Northeastern Illinois. Browse the website for useful lifestyle hacks and real estate opportunities. For inquiries, call 847.971.0674 or email rjames(at)askunique(dotted)com.