Easy but fun way of making cards and art for the walls already at a young age: precut paper in various shapes and colours, take out a glue stick, and off you go.
My boy was about 1 year and 3-4 months when we did something like this the first time. He quite enjoyed just choosing the bits and distributing them, on the paper, and initially I helped him glue them. When the kids have grown older, I have also shown them that by putting e.g. tree triangles on top of each other, you can make a spruce three. After giving a few ideas like these, my daughter, now 3, has herself used various shapes to build a house with windows etc. Creating these type of art has given a natural opportunity to train colours and shapes with kids too (as our kids grow up speaking 3 languages we are pretty aware of creating opportunities to support the language development): “Please give me the red triangle and the blue oval?”
I seem to be good at stealing ideas from children’s programmes: first there was making an instrument from Angelina Ballerina, now this idea with some adjustment is from the Maisy Mouse’ Christmas DVD.
Here is another pretty cool thing to do with a glue stick and shapes, maybe rather for a bit bigger kids and especially as a group exercise.
Free But Fun 
Reblogged this on Free But Fun! and commented:
1,5 years later, we still do this:
This sounds so simple and yet so fun! Maybe I should watch more cartoons with my children and get some inspiration. I shall steal this idea with my kids. And by the way, what are the 3 languages that your kids speak?
I never thought cartoons would be so good for ideas 🙂
My husband is a kiwi so he only uses English, and my family speaks Finnish and Swedish (both official languages here, even though Swedish is used only by a minority).
I’m jealous of your children’s trilingual home! (Would you do a temporary swap?)
Thanks for another great idea – you don’t know how much direction I need in this regard.
Nice to hear that some of the things we’ve liked are useful to others too! Swap sounds like fun, especially when the trilingual tantrums are here 😉
Trilingual tantrums, eh? Well, I’m sure I can ignore tantrums in most languages 😉