Category: Arts and Crafts

Watercolours are great for indoor painting

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Watercolours are a great form of indoor painting. They’re much less mess than poster paint and easy to wipe up if you’re using a plastic mat or lino. They also handily come with a whole palette of colours!

These are great for encouraging creative messy play, colours (and colour mixing), fine motor control, and learning a process. Encourage them to go: paint, paper, water, paint etc. I find an old glass baby food jar ideal for washing brushes. It’s best to put only a tiny amount of water and change it frequently (that way there’s less to clean up if it gets knocked over!).

Watercolours will often come with a small brush. You can also experiment with other brushes, fingers, even a wet wipe will provide cool textures and colour mixing! If you’re toddler loves painting themselves and is going to do so anyway, why not support them in their experiment and try putting our a hand mirror so that they can see what they’re doing.

Supervision, support, encouragement, and modelling is important for toddlers. It can take a while to learn that the brush needs washing or that it’s not a good idea to smear black paint over all the other paint colours on the palette. On the bright side, they’re easy to wipe with a tissue or wet wipe to get back to a ‘purer’ colour.

Wet wipe watercolour painting

How to make your own Christmas Crackers 

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Making your own Christmas Crackers (or Bonbons) can be a lot of fun, cost effective,  and a nice way to really personalise them. It can also be a relief as a parent with a young toddler because you can tailor them to be age appropriate (i.e. avoiding choking hazards).

Ingredients 

  • Cracker snaps
  • Cardboard tubes (inner tubes from paper towels are perfect,  just cut in half).
  • Your choice of cracker filling.
  • Wrapping paper
  • Ribbon
  • Sellotape
  • Scissors

Note: Davids Emporium  sells cracker snaps for 30 cents each just ask at the sales counter.

You can have a lot of fun choosing what you want to put inside your crackers depending on your budget, ages, and family interests. You might love silly kids jokes (like: What does a duck eat at Christmas? Quackers!), or love Minties, or want to do a toy car each. Party / variety shops can be useful, so can buying stuff from the supermarket when it’s on sale.

I decided to include in each cracker a little note, balloon, a wooden animal (from the button section of the craft store) and a chocolate. My toddler loves balloons and the chocolates are my mum’s favourite flavour. I also decided to add little wooden beads as decorations that I knew my toddler would enjoy playing with afterwards.

Directions

  1. Take a cracker snap and place it inside in your tube (it should stick out each end with a comfortable amount to pull on). Lightly sellotape it at each end to hold in place.
  2. Assemble your cracker filling and slide it into the tube. I wrapped mine in the note & then used an elastic band to hold it together.
  3. Roll the tube in paper and tie at each end;  make sure that you have enough paper at each end to cover the cracker snap that is sticking out & to comfortably pull it.  I found Christmas paper & ribbon to be ideal. You could also try something like crepe paper, twine, and hot glue on sea shells. You can be as creative as you like!