Several years ago, the girls each made an art box. Sunshine was in preschool at the time and coming home with plenty of projects and crafts every day—which ended up either on the fridge or in her room. If she saw me sneaking it into the recycling, it was World War 3. Every project was a masterpiece that simply needed to be saved. So I came up with the Art Box.
Supplies Needed:
- sturdy cardboard box
- construction paper, tissue paper, wrapping paper, or scrap fabric for covering box
- crayons, markers, paints, etc. (whatever your child’s favourite art medium is!)
- stencils, foam stickers, glitter, etc. for decorating box
How to Create Your Art Box
I picked out two sturdy, flat cardboard boxes that were big enough to hold most of the girls’ paper art projects—even those done on poster paper. (You’ll see that one box was for frozen chicken and the other, I think, came in the mail from my aunt.) I got out the construction paper, pencil crayons, stickers and stencils and let them decorate their boxes however they wanted.
Lily was slightly more open to suggestions about her art box and let me cover it in construction paper before she began applying stickers. Sunshine insisted that she liked the chicken on her box and simply went to work decorating.
Earlier this year, when Jade was in her “I love painting” phase, I looked around for something other than another piece of paper for her to cover with paint. A box nearby seemed like a great item for her to paint, whether I recycled it or not. She was quite happy decorating the top with acrylic paints.
I actually use that box as a place to stash all of our school materials from last year—Sunshine’s Grade 1 workbooks and Lily’s preschool workbooks. It’s also got memorabilia of other things we did over the year, like the theatre leaflet from the day camp that Sunshine did over spring break and some of the scavenger hunts we did on field trips. All that will probably end up in the recycling in a few years, but for now, it gives me an organized place to keep our finished school materials from our first year of homeschooling, in case anybody wants proof that we did homeschool.
When we created the girls’ reusable calendars, I pulled out their art boxes looking for materials (the fridge was a bit bare that week). The girls had a blast looking back through the projects they had worked on in Kindergarten and preschool. It was actually really fun to see their excitement as they pulled out various pieces and said, “I remember this!!!” or shared a story about creating it. It made me glad that I had created the art boxes and gone to the work to save those projects for them.
Cost: $5
Difficulty: easy (suitable for children 2+)
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