Cute nursery rhyme activity for kids: make a Little Bo Peep doll and sheep using toilet paper rolls and other items you probably already have at home. Great for role-playing, as Little Bo Peep’s expression can change from worried to happy when her lambs come home, with tails wagging.
Make a DIY colour sorter using an upcycled egg carton and some paint! For all the colours of the rainbow (and 3 more).
I made this DIY colour sorter for the kids, and it sits in on our craft shelves along with all the colourful loose parts. It’s great little one minute activity that I can pull out at no notice. “Here kids, would you like to sort these mini pom poms while I…..”
I made it last year when JJ was at preschool and Bee was napping. I can actually remember thinking that there were a million and one things I *should* have been doing, but actually it was quite fun (and therapeutic) just to take a minute and paint. I painted all the colours of the rainbow (cheating slightly with dark blue instead of indigo), and adding pink, white and black. (I know white and black are not technically colours, but let’s not get into semantics). Had it been a dozen egg carton, I would have added gold and silver too.
You could use it as a colour sorting toy for all kinds of colourful loose parts – pom poms, buttons, confetti, beads, loom bands, jewels….. All fun ‘work’ for colour recognition and fine motor skills.
We’ve mainly used ours with pom poms and pony beads so far – that’s enough of a challenge for the little fingers in our house.
This post is part of the 60 Day #junkplay challenge, hosted by Best Toys For Toddlers. Follow along, join in, and be inspired to get creative with things you already have at home.
Or for more egg carton ideas, you might also like our egg carton roses?
xx Danya
(Please note: all kids activities on this blog require attentive adult supervision. Parents and carers will need to judge whether a particular activity is appropriate their child’s age and skill level. Small items can represent a choking hazard.)
We had lots of fun stamping with these DIY heart shaped stamps which we made from – you guessed it – toilet paper rolls!
Our two year and three month old toddler Bee has been really interested in heart and star shapes lately, and this interest is what inspired this particular process-orientated art session. (But with Valentine’s Day just around the corner, heart shapes conveniently fit with that theme too!)
Cardboard rolls, such as toilet paper, paper towel or gift wrap roll (cut to size) make really good DIY stampers for toddlers and preschoolers.
They are free.
They are readily available.
They encourage kids to think about reusing (or re-purposing), rather than buying something new.
You can create all sorts of shapes.
Their length gives enough room for little kids to use one end as a ‘handle’.
They may even be able to wield two!
And of course, no toddler painting session is complete without a bit of sensory finger painting. It’s at about this point that you can tell she’s focusing more on how the paint feels squishing under her palms, than concerning herself with such minor details as how her art project with look. (I think that’s the difference between toddlers and adults really.)
Fun!
Would you like to make some heart shape stamps too? All you need is a cardboard tube and tape. Let me show you…
And then you have a beautiful piece of heart art for you to stick on the fridge door (or perhaps turn into a Valentine’s Day card??)
Here are some of our other TP roll posts:
And I even have a Pinterest board dedicated to this versatile craft material!
Easy DIY glitter party poppers – fun for kids parties or New Years Eve.
With the Christmas hustle and bustle behind us, we’ve been enjoying a few lazy days at home. I wasn’t actually planning on making any New Years Eve arts & crafts this year, but lazy days at our place tends to involve making something or other, and with the excitment of our first proper New Years Eve celebrations approaching, we made some very sparkly homemade party poppers that are easy for the kids to pop and refill again. Hours (or at least minutes) of entertainment! 🙂
These party poppers are actually remarkably easy to make. You’ll need:
empty toilet paper rolls (or other similar cardboard tubes)
a few good quality balloons
scissors
craft glue and super fine glitter (optional)
your choice of small and light weight fillers (see below for suggestions).
The first step is to gather your TP rolls, balloons and scissors. You can make your own party popper with just these three items. Helium quality balloons work best.
Tie the end of the balloon and cut a very small section off the other end.
Then stretch the cut section over the end of your TP roll. Some balloons might split at this point, so it’s good to have a few spare. I found that the lower quality / old balloons from my stash split really easily, whereas the higher quality helium style balloons were much better.
And technically that’s all you need to do to make a DIY party popper! You could even make these after the party has already started, especially if you have balloons and confetti or similar on hand. It seriously takes less than a minute, and costs just a few cents.
Pour your filler into the open end, pull back on the knot ‘handle’, let go and watch your fillers shoot out! It even makes a loud popping sound. And you can refill to pop over and over and over again.
Or, of course, you can always add in an extra step and decorate your party poppers. You could paint them, or wrap them in washi tape. We chose to coat them in copious amounts of glitter. 🙂 JJ helped with this part – we painted the party poppers with craft glue inside and out, sprinkled on super fine glitter in silver and gold, and left them overnight to dry.
We tried out a few different filler options:
glitter works really well – it shoots out like a stream of sparkles. (The very top image on this post is edited, because glitter shooting out is VERY hard to photograph, but it is quite a good indication of what it looks like).
cut sections of sparkly pipe cleaner was my favourite of the fillers we tried. They are really light weight, so the party poppers could shoot them a long way, and they are big enough to make them easy to pick up to refill (or clean up afterwards).
little sequins work well (ours were star shaped), especially when combined with the glitter and cut pipe cleaners. My main concern was that they are so fiddly to clean up afterwards.
tiny sparkly pom poms sound good in theory. They did work, but they were slightly disappointing. They tended to get caught in the bottom of the balloon knot bit.
we didn’t try confetti but I think this would work well too. I’ve seen metallic sparkly confetti for sale at craft shops that looks like it would be perfect for this sort of thing.
JJ has declared the gold one hers ‘because she likes gold best’ and the silver one Bee’s ‘because Bee likes blue and silver best’.
Now we just need to wait for the big night – which is coming up VERY VERY soon!
See you in 2015!
xx Danya
Here are some of the other TP roll art & craft ideas we’ve tried.
And I even have a Pinterest board dedicated to this versatile craft material!
New Years Eve is just around the corner, and we’ll be taking the kids to see the fireworks over Sydney Harbour for the first time. They are super excited! To prepare us for the visual onslaught, I thought we could do a little fireworks painting at home beforehand.
I set up this simple invitation to paint with dark construction paper, pre-cut toilet paper roll fireworks stamps, paints (white, yellow, red, gold and silver glitter), and a ‘spare’ toilet paper roll and scissors. Then I waited to see who would take the bait….
After a minute she spied the ‘spare’ toilet paper roll, and started to cut her own stamper (just as I’d hoped). Her cutting skills have really improved lately.
Two and a quarter year old Bee then joined in as well. JJ showed Bee what to do. (They play so well together at the moment, that I almost don’t want to say it out loud in case I jinx myself).
I think they turned out rather well!
You do so many things with TP rolls. Here are some of our other ideas:
Three ideas for making your own wrapping paper for Christmas, including how to make DIY Christmas bauble stampers.
We’ve been painting BIG this week!
Usually we use the kids’ art as wrapping paper (sticking several smaller pieces together if we need a larger size), but we’ve had lots of birthdays lately and our art stash is running thin. So we decided to try painting on a bigger scale to make some DIY wrapping paper, just in time for all the wrapping of the silly season.
We tried out a few different techniques (including making our own Christmas bauble stampers from toilet paper rolls), and I think the results are really pretty.
1. Tape Resist Pattern Roller Painting
The first technique we tried involved using painters tape and pattern rollers. I put on the (green) painters tape, with a little help from my four year old daughter JJ, and then set out rollers and paint on paper plates. These particular rollers we received as a gift, but you can also make your own pattern rollers by sticking foam shapes onto a plain paint roller (or lint roller). I chose red, green and white for a Christmas feel, but you could use any colours.
We hadn’t painted like this before, and the kids had a ball with the big canvas and the new tools.
This was a process style art project, and my only guidance was PAINT BIG! If either of the girls became too fixated on one particular spot, I gently guided them to blank part of the paper. With my two year old toddler Bee, this meant moving her to stand on another chair.
Afterwards, we pegged it onto our drying fence, and JJ removed the tape to reveal the blank lines underneath.
The tape resist effect would have been more effective if the paper had been more consistently covered with paint, but it was still fun and pretty nonetheless.
2. Finger painting
While our first piece of wrapping paper was drying, the girls begged to make some more! We have quite a few December birthdays, so this time we made a decidedly un-Christmassy piece of wrapping paper, using Micador’s fluoro finger paints (that we received from Great-Grandma for Christmas last year). The kids found they could shove their whole (tiny) hands into the pots and then SMEAR. So much fun!
This wrapping paper looks even more fluoro when it had dried! Although just to let you know that it does flake a little where the kids smeared it on thickly, so be prepared to brush down your table top after gift wrapping.
3. Painting with Cookie cutter stampers (and how to make a DIY Christmas bauble stamper)
The following day, JJ asked if she could paint again. Sure! As you may have guessed, we love any excuse to get our art and craft on!
This time I suggested using our Christmas cookie cutters as stampers, which JJ thought was a fabulous idea. However she asked for a Christmas bauble shaped stamper, and we don’t have this type in our cookie cutter collection… Then I remembered seeing Tidbits share how to make a pumpkin stamp over on Make It and Love It, and I thought – that would totally work as a Christmas bauble stamper too!
I followed Tidbit’s tutorial to make the basic stamper shape out of two halves of a toilet paper roll, except that I was lazy and just used sticky tape to hold it all together instead of hot glue. Once or twice it did need readjusting, but overall it worked quite well. Don’t you think??
JJ (aka the panda) thought it was cool. She tried out several of our other Christmas cookie cutters, but reverted back to this DIY bauble stamper and the small star cookie cutter as her favourites.
The bauble stamp started to show some wear and tear towards the end of the painting session, but still made very pretty (although thicker) bauble prints.
But, wait, there’s more. Guess what happened next?
A bird did a wee on our art! Argh! I love the dappled shade in our backyard, but I hadn’t really thought about the possibilities of bird wee! As if I didn’t have enough wee already to contend with already, considering we have both a toilet training toddler and new puppy in the house at the moment…..
But wee aside, after these three wrapping paper art sessions, we made over nine metres of DIY wrapping paper (minus a few torn out sections for wee removal!)
So we’ve got plenty of wrapping paper for upcoming birthdays and Christmas – guess I’d better start buying presents now, huh?
We’ve had so much fun making Christmas crafts with toilet paper rolls, that I thought I would have a little look around and see what other loo roll or cardboard tube inspired Christmas creations there are out there. Wowzers, there are thousands! So in the lead up to the big day, here are my favourite twelve (days of Christmas toilet paper roll crafts)….
On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me… two cute reindeer (from The Craft Train),
and a toilet roll advent Christmas tree.
On the third day of Christmas, my true love gave to me… three wise men (from Red Ted Art),
two cute reindeer
and a toilet roll advent Christmas tree.
On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me… four mini wreaths (from Happiness is Homemade),
three wise men,
two cute reindeer
and a toilet roll advent Christmas tree.
On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…
our emo Santa doll,
four mini wreaths,
three wise men,
two cute reindeer
and a toilet roll advent Christmas tree.
On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…. six snowmen bowling (from Red Ted Art),
an emo Santa doll,
four mini wreaths,
three wise men,
two cute reindeer
and a toilet roll advent Christmas tree.
On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me… seven tie dyed crackers (from The Craft Train),
six snowmen bowling,
an emo Santa doll,
four mini wreaths,
three wise men,
two cute reindeer
and a toilet roll advent Christmas tree.
On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…
(just pretend there are) eight Christmas trees (from Reading Confetti),
seven tie dyed crackers
six snowmen bowling,
an emo Santa doll,
four mini wreaths,
three wise men,
two cute reindeer
and a toilet roll advent Christmas tree.
On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me… nine homemade Christmas wreaths (from Childhood 101),
eight Christmas trees,
seven tie dyed crackers
six snowmen bowling,
an emo Santa doll,
four mini wreaths,
three wise men,
two cute reindeer
and a toilet roll advent Christmas tree.
On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…
ten star tree toppers
nine homemade wreaths,
eight Christmas trees,
seven tie dyed crackers,
six snowmen bowling,
an emo Santa doll,
four mini wreaths,
three wise men,
two cute reindeer
and a toilet roll advent Christmas tree.
On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…
eleven scornful Grinches (from Crafty Morning)
ten star tree toppers,
nine homemade wreaths,
eight Christmas trees,
seven tie dyed crackers,
six snowmen bowling,
an emo Santa doll,
four mini wreaths,
three wise men,
two cute reindeer
and a toilet roll advent Christmas tree.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…
twelve Frosty emo dolls
eleven scornful Grinches
ten star tree toppers,
nine homemade wreaths,
eight Christmas trees,
seven tie dyed crackers,
six snowmen bowling,
an emo Santa doll,
four mini wreaths,
three wise men,
two cute reindeer
and a toilet roll advent Christmas tree.
Do you have any other favourites to add to the list? And when is too early to start singing Christmas carols? (I admit that I sometimes catch myself humming them all year round…)
these fingerprint ‘Christmas Lights’ cards are easy enough for toddlers and preschoolers to do together (or individually if you prefer to keep your sanity).
my kids played with this gingerbread playdough for ages and ages – long enough that I could enjoy a cup of tea even!
this DIY fireworks stamp painting idea is consistently one of the most popular posts on this blog. My kids have done this activity a few times now and love it every time!
PLUS you can always subscribe to our newsletter too! That way you’ll always be kept up to date with our latest Christmas toilet paper roll awesomeness. 🙂
Fun Christmas countdown idea for kids – how to make a TP roll Christmas tree advent calendar!
It’s nearing the end of November, which means that it’s Advent Calendar time! Last year I made a super easy Christmas card advent calendar. This year I thought I would try a little upcycled Christmas Tree advent calendar using… toilet paper rolls! Haha, they seem to be my favourite Christmas craft material. (I’ve also made a Santa doll, a Frosty doll and a DIY star tree topper – all with the humble loo roll!)
What I liked most about last year’s activity-based Advent Calendar, was that I could change the order of the activities depending on what was happening day by day. This flexibility meant that we had all the fun of an activity advent calendar, without the stress of having to follow a pre-set schedule. I didn’t have to decide weeks in advance what date we were going to bake gingerbread men. Instead I could wait until the night before to decide what we were going to do the following day.
So for this year, I wanted to make an advent calendar that gave me easy access to the individual dates so I could play things by ear again.
And then I looked at the toilet paper rolls that were collecting on our craft shelves, and I had a little thought.
It went something like this….
The kids can poke a hole through the front every day to retrieve an activity (or perhaps occasionally a lolly) and get the whole thrill of counting down to Christmas. And I can access all the date slots from the back, so I can add an activity each night for the following day. Win/win!
Would you like to see how I made it?
How to make a DIY advent calendar, with toilet paper rolls
You need:
12 x toilet paper rolls (or you could use paper towel rolls, or other cardboard tubes)
craft PVA glue
green and brown crepe paper
silver metallic permanent marker
silver craft threaded beads (from a haberdashery or craft supply shop)
pink & silver rhinestones (ditto)
gift wrap bow
2 x craft sticks
craft scissors
garden secateurs
Sticky tape
Firstly I cut the toilet paper rolls in half, and glued the tubes together into a tree shape. There’s no need to be too tidy with this part, as the glue dries clear, and you won’t see this bit from the front anyway.
Leave it to dry, but be careful that it doesn’t stick to whatever it is sitting on. I moved mine several times while it was drying, and wiped down the surface below, so that it didn’t stick. Once it is completely dried, you should be able to pick it up like this without any of the tubes coming loose. (Notice the kids in the background? They were playing with water beads in the blow up pool… It was a really hot Aussie day!)
Then use a thin smearing of glue to paste on a double layer of green and brown crepe paper, and cut back to be flush with the loo rolls, adding a touch of extra glue here and there as needed.
Now it’s time to add the numbers! I found a silver metallic Sharpie pen (permanent marker) worked best, as the metallic ink doesn’t ‘bleed’ into the contact paper. I have added my numbers from 24-1, so that the advent calender is a ‘count down’ to Christmas (i.e. on 1st December, they would open number 24, as there is 24 days until Christmas). If you would rather that the numbers correspond to the date, then use the reverse order.
To decorate our little tree, I used some threaded beads and rhinestones that I already had in our craft cupboard. The rhinestones are sticky on the back, which made for easy application. But you could use any decorations really – I imagine sequins would look lovely!
To add the bow, I attached it to a craft stick with sticky tape, and cut a small slit in the top most tube. I trimmed the craft stick with secateurs (a trick I learnt from my fairy door days) until it was the right size, and inserted it into the slit.
And ta da! Now the kids have a new advent calendar, that they are just busting to use. They keep asking if it is 1st December yet. (I think we might need a special advent calendar to count down to the real one!).
It can be displayed either lying down flat, or hung on any wall hook. (But I think it looks best up on the wall).
I’ve printed off the activities from last year and I already know which one we’ll do first – putting up the Christmas tree! It’s our 1st December tradition. As for the rest, we’ll see how we go…
Do you make your own advent calendar? When do you put up your Christmas tree? And do you also share my obsession with toilet paper roll crafting?
xx Danya
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