Arts and Craft Activities to Keep Your Children Occupied During The Summer Holidays!

Art is hugely beneficial for children, offering them an opportunity for open-ended play, boosting their imagination and creativity. It's also great for their independence. 

There are a lot of arts and craft activities that can be done in the comfort of your own home.

Here are a few holiday activities at home that every parent can do with their children…

Story-telling Through Art- Create a Summer Mural

One of many great holiday activities at home is to create a Summer Mural.

Capturing all the fun events that children (of all ages) do during the summer!

1. Take a long white piece of paper (for example white paper on a roll or brown paper it doesn’t matter) and tape it from one end of a wall to another (for example a garage wall or cellar wall) where it can stay up for the 6-week holidays.
2. Encourage the children to draw on it daily to show what they have done, by painting, hand-drawing, and notating what they have done.

A perfect way to pictorially show their summer holiday activities which allow children to do fun art activities regularly.

Once the summer holidays are drawing to a close, ask the children to show it to family and friends as a fun memory of their holidays!

Magical Messy Play- Fairy/Elf Houses

A magical and easy summer activity for children to do at home.

Fairy/Elf houses are one of many fun art activities for children aged between 3-8!

They will all remember the lovely children’s TV programme “Ben and Holly’s Little Kingdom” and books, if not then Usborne’s “The Twinkly, twinkly fairies” are lovely sources to ignite your children’s creative sparks!

All you need are clay plant pots, outdoor paints, paint pens, permanent markers, glue, and of course some glitter and some sparkly gemstones!

1. Let the children draw, paint and design little Fairy and Elf houses with doors, windows, flower beds, etc on them.
2. They could even pick some flowers and leaves to place on top as the chimney!
3. Once created let the children take them outside into your garden to create their own Fairy/Elf villages. Placing the Fairy/Elf houses amongst the trees, letting them use moss, grass, twigs, pinecones, acorns, flowers, stones etc to create their own magical little kingdom.

A perfect place for children to pass hours playing and letting their imaginations run wild!

Ocean Themed Wooden Spoon Puppets and Role Play

Summer holiday activities can be imagination based.

This art activity is a fantastic way of taking children to the seaside when you can’t physically go!

A lovely way to introduce children to this theme is by watching Disney’s “Finding Nemo” or reading “The Snail and the Whale” by Julia Donaldson.

With all the wonderful sea life in the film and book, children will be full of ideas about what fish and creatures to paint!

One of many great holiday activities at home, all you need is some wooden spoons and utensils, paints, pencils, permanent markers, coloured cardboard, wiggly eyes, glitter, string, glitter and a wooden tray.

1. First, get the children to decide on what sort of sea creatures they would like to make. Is it a Clownfish, a Dory fish, an octopus, a turtle, a shark, a whale, a snail, a dolphin, a starfish, a jellyfish etc?  
2. Once decided, see what wooden spoons and utensils would match their sea creature. For example, a big wooden serving spoon would be good for a whale, a wooden fork would be ideal for a jellyfish or octopus using the forks as their tentacles and a small wooden spoon could be used for a Clownfish or snail.
3. So that the colours are vibrant and stand out, first paint all the wooden utensils white.
4. Once dry use a pencil or black permanent marker to draw the outline of your sea creature. If the children are creating a Clownfish, for example, draw the stripes on the spoon so that they can see where to paint around the white stripes.
5. Then use orange paint to make the Clownfish. Let the coloured paint dry before using a new colour.
6. When dry the children can go over their black marker lines for definition.
7. Once the paint is dry and the definition has been added, the children can embellish their sea creatures by adding wiggly eyes, glitter, fins with the coloured cardboard, cardboard legs and shell if doing a turtle, and string if adding extra tentacles onto a jellyfish. The world is their oyster!
8. Once all the sea creature characters have been created take the wooden tray and design the bottom of the Ocean.
9. The tray can be painted blue and with a marker pen, waves can be drawn on it. One bottom of the tray can be painted yellow for sand.
10. Once dry, spread some glue and sprinkle glitter on it to add texture. Shells, pebbles, and plastic seaweed can be stuck to the tray for extra sealife effects!
11. Using the side handles slide the wooden sea creature puppets through the holes bringing their own “puppet theatre” to life!

Let the children play for hours as they pretend to be Nemo, Snail or their own characters in the deep blue sea and watch as daring adventures unravel!

One of many wonderful art activities that encourages imagination, creativity, communication, and fine motor skills!

We hope these Artsy Activities are useful! Keep your eyes peeled on our edu-blog for even more fantastic tips for the summer holidays!