This is a super easy and low-key activity that kids really enjoy.  At our house, this can easily fill the good part of a morning.  The only limit is imagination.

What you need:

• Old catalogues and/or magazines - we love to use our old Boden and seed catalogues, for instance

• Safety scissors

• Glue sticks

• Construction paper or any kind of heavier weight paper

What to do:

Have your little one cut out anything that is of interest, and glue to pieces of paper.  If your little is fairly young (3 or younger), she’ll need a bit of help and will probably be content just with the excitement of pasting things.

If you have a pre-schooler or older kid  in the mix, encourage them to make a mixed media project by gluing images to a drawing.  For example, around the holidays Sweetpea wanted to make a sleigh.  We drew our own sleigh with reindeer, and then we combed the catalogues for goodies to put in the sleigh.  Other times we’ve drawn spring gardens and pasted pictures of flowers to complete it, or once we made a visual menu for her “restaurant” by pasting pictures of food into a little blank book we’d made.  Like I said, the possibilities are endless.  And since catalogues are so seasonal in nature, it also provides a nice opportunity to talk about what changes your kids might see around them.

Be sure to talk with your little about the images you cut out - the size, the color, the shape, and what you can do with them both in real life and in your project.

You rock mama:

• Builds fine motor skills

• Builds creativity + imagination

• Builds problem solving

• Builds vocabulary