The role of art in a child’s development is crucial. It opens their minds and helps them learn a myriad of lessons throughout their learning period. Art and creativity shouldn’t just happen at school. Your home should also be an area where kids are able to explore their creative side.
The problem is that many parents these days are too busy to plan, create and take part in art activities with their kids. It seems like it takes a long time to come up with the right types of activities and then even more time to follow through.
Luckily, there are a lot of arts and crafts that kids can do alone or with parents that don’t take much time to plan or cut down on the time you need to be involved. In this article, I will go over some of the ways you can incorporate art activities into your routine without getting stressed out.
Use washable paints
One of the worst parts about doing artistic activities with the kids is the clean up afterward. When you are busy it is the point of friction that you inevitably think about and decide to do it another time.
The way around this is to use materials that wash up easily so you don’t have to spend more time on the cleaning up after than the activity itself.
Use things like washable tempera paint so it is a breeze to wash up. And if you really want to make it easy on yourself, you can do something like put some of this tempera paint on a canvas or wood or some material like that. Then, the kids can scrape off the pain into a design that they like when the background is revealed. This makes it far less messy since they aren’t handling the paint which can be spilled or trailed around.
Have a creativity corner
On the theme of cleaning up, the other aspect about activities that end up taking up a lot of time is setting things up and putting stuff away. When you’re busy this tends to take up more time than you actually have so activities get sidelined.
When you have an area of your home dedicated to arts and crafts, it ends up saving you loads of time since you have everything at hand. You don’t have to worry about setting up for painting when it is essentially already to go when you decide to paint. Or, do any other creative activity.
It can literally be a corner of a room that doesn’t get used for much so you aren’t missing the space if you use it for making art. It is far more organized this way and makes it a pleasure to create.
Let things go
If you don’t have time to clean the house properly and also make time to do creative activities with your kids, then the choice is clear. The housework has to suffer. Let those dishes sit in the sink for a while. Or, maybe don’t worry about the dog hair on the couch today.
Kids need to have a creative outlet and time to bind with their parents more than they need a tidy home.
I’m a 20-something stay-at-home mother and wife. I have an amazing husband, a beautiful daughter, two loving dogs, and a lazy cat. I wouldn’t change my life for anything! I love to read, listen to music, cook and blog!
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