Active Outdoor Crafts for Kids

It is summertime, and kids love to play outside in the sun all day long. Sometimes, it is a good idea to give them some crafts to let their creative juices flow while they enjoy the warm weather.

Why Should Your Kids Craft Outside?

Crafting is a beneficial activity for your child’s development. It allows them to improve their motor skills by manipulating their pencil or paintbrush. Their problem-solving skills benefit as well because the process of creating art involves a lot of analysis and experimenting with different materials.

Making crafting an active outdoor activity helps your children be active since they have to go around collecting the materials, and bigger projects require a bit more moving around. Being idle too much by sitting in front of a TV, for example, can cause your children to gain unhealthy weight. You do not want your child later becoming part of the two-thirds of adults in the U.S. who are overweight or obese because it causes a lot of health problems.

Here are a few active outdoor crafts your kids should try.

Make Decorations for Your Property’s Gardens

Making something that you can add to your garden is not only fun, but it will be a conversation starter when you have guests. Beautify your garden with rock painting! Your children can paint little faces on the rocks to make rock animals or they can decorate some stones for your garden’s rockery.

You could also try making beautiful nature mandalas to decorate your garden path or any bare portions of your garden. A mandala is a circular piece of art that spreads from the middle. You can use flowers, sticks, leaves, and anything else you can find in the garden to beautify your landscaping!

Outdoor Paintings

A typical home has 2.5 bathrooms, three bedrooms, and carries a price tag of $200,000 for 1,800 square feet. Homes of this size certainly have room for wall art made by your own children!

Have your kids try their hand at some outdoor painting in your backyard. Painting outdoors doesn’t have to be with boring paintbrushes and paper; you can do it on a much larger scale. The outdoors gives more room for a mess, so you can try a project using water guns or water balloons filled with paint to shoot onto a canvas. You can even paint with your hands and feet. Make outdoor painting as fun as it can be for your children!

Go On a Nature Walk and Create “Nature Sculptures”

Nature walks are certainly fun, as you will be having a little adventure with your kids finding materials for an art project, like building a sculpture. A “nature sculpture” can be made from any material as long as you can keep it standing. Go on a nature walk to find sticks, stones, pine cones, leaves, and more. Then, add paint, glitter, and more when you get home.

Let your kids truly be creative with this project. They’ll have a blast trying to keep their natural materials standing up! Once the “nature sculptures” are complete, you can line your garden or porch with the fun pieces of art handmade by your children.

Create a Stage and Props for an Outdoor Puppet Show

It can be exciting to create a stage and puppets for a puppet show. Use some branches and large leaves to make a stage, then have various objects for the props and the puppets. A pine cone owl or a rock painted with a face are some ideas your children can use to make puppets!

Doing a puppet show is not only fun but is great for your child’s cognitive skills, too. You can help them write a script for the show to help them develop their ability to read fast and attach meaning to words. These skills, along with synthesizing stage directions, must be met by voice artists who record TV shows and movies. By doing a free-spirited puppet show, your kids can appreciate these skills and try them out!

Staying active outdoors is important, and it can be fun! Join your children outside and have some family craft time before the summer ends.