At Home Activities to Help Your Child Get Creative

At Muddy Boots we focus on developing a child’s individual personalities through a variety of different ways. We love to go on adventures, be creative, and get messy! Inspired by the way we work, we’ve come up with a list of activity suggestions for you and your little ones to do at home. From (relatively) mess free activities to those that might make an extra load of laundry, there’s something here for everyone.

Nature Collages

Making nature collages is an easy way to get yourselves out in nature as well as getting creative. To do this, you can go for a walk and let your child find some flowers, leaves and sticks they like, before coming back home and decorating some paper with them. When you have found all your pieces, you can make the pictures however you want; sticking the plants down, making holes in the paper to thread the stems through, or even using something heavy to stamp the colours of the flowers onto the paper. Whether it's in your back garden, your local park or somewhere further afield, there’s plenty of plants around to inspire your child to make something new. If you’re looking for ideas on where to visit, take a look at our Fun and Free Days Out blog for spots across Yorkshire, or our Great Parks and Green Spaces blog for more local spots to York.

Colour Scavenger Hunt

Similar to the nature collages, you can also go on a colour scavenger hunt. A great way to do this is by painting a cardboard box or egg carton with different colours that you want to hunt for - choose as many as you like! Once you have your box sorted, it's time to venture into the outdoors. Go for a walk with your family, and see how many colours you can spot; once you find something that matches a colour in your box (e.g. a pink flower) you can place it next to the corresponding colour. Not only does this boost creativity, but it also helps your child learn about colours. It’s important to note in both of these activities that we emphasise finding flowers and leaves that have already fallen, rather than picking ones that are growing.

Back Garden Treasure Map

Become the next best pirate captain and send your first mate on a quest for gold! A great way to get your kids out and exploring while still staying at home is by doing a back garden treasure map. You could spend time drawing out the map together, coming up with fun names for the things in your garden before marking where you’ve hidden the treasure, or it could be a complete surprise for your little one to wake up to on the weekend. While this is more likely to be a one time activity, you could get multiple uses out of the same map by having your ‘X marks the spot’ as a separate piece of paper/card that you can stick on in different locations each time you bury treasure. However you decide to do it, a back garden treasure map is an exciting way to get your child to explore the world around them from the comfort of your own home, as well as encouraging them to be analytical and think creatively about where the treasure might be hidden.

Rock Painting

There’s lots of things you can do with rocks/stones, and one of the most common is painting! Whether you’ve collected rocks from places you visit, or you go on a search to find them at your local park, there’s so much possibility with this activity. You can paint the rocks different colours to use in other activities like the scavenger hunt, or you can paint animals/faces/etc. - the possibilities are pretty much endless! Any rocks painted as animals or faces could then also be used in games your child plays, they don’t just have to sit untouched or on display. Particularly for parents of anxious children, you could paint ‘worry stones’ together; the rock then becomes much more than a toy or something to look at, it can become a comfort for your child and something they can hold when scared.

Homemade Bath Paint

Homemade bath paint is a fantastic, and easily washable, way to encourage your child to make art. Although what they make is not something you can display, it's an excellent way for your child to get creative during their everyday life. You can buy bath paints, but there are plenty of easy recipes to follow online for making your own that only use a few simple ingredients (cornstarch, baby shampoo, water and food colouring). Using homemade paints comes with an additional learning bonus of getting your child to help make the paints rather than just using them; picking out the colours, measuring the ingredients, mixing, etc. all contributing to their teamwork skills. This activity could also help your child if they don’t enjoy baths, as it's something to keep them occupied and that makes the time spent in the bath more exciting!

Marble Painting

Marble painting is a more classic creative activity for you and your children, and there are a few different ways to do it! A more well known way is by placing a piece of paper in a container and rolling around marbles on it that have been dipped in different colours. Some other, perhaps more messy, ways of marble painting are to use a combination of shaving cream and paints/ink that you dip your paper into, or even mixing paint into water and washing up liquid to make bubble prints by blowing through a straw. This kind of free form, more abstract painting can be great for visual learning, as your child watches how the paints swirl around and mix together to create new colours. There are so many ways to make a colourful marble masterpiece, and you can find more detailed instructions online.

DIY Foam Paint

If your child loves to make slime, then they’ll love this activity. Foam/Puffy Paint is on the rise, and it's such a fun way to get creative. Similar to the bath paints, you can work together with your child to make the paints and pick the colours; after that it's just about making art and the possibilities are endless. The great thing about foam paint is that, when dried, it has a soft squishy texture which can be a great sensory experience for your child as well. You can easily find recipes online that only use three ingredients which you probably already have at home, all you need to do is create!

Conclusion

There are so many fun ways to get creative and have some fun with your family, these are just some of our favourites. At Muddy Boots, we believe that every child is allowed to get a bit messy, it's one of the many joys of life, especially when you're young. Having creative freedom while you learn is important too, which is why these creativity boosting activities are great for your child’s budding personality. So why not give these activities a try? Let your creativity run wild, have fun, and most importantly, get messy!