Kids Craft - DIY Signs
I haven’t talked about it too much on here yet, but we’ve been homeschooling since 2019 and it has been the absolute best decision we could have made for Kiddo’s education.
We’ve been able to take the time to figure out how she learns best which when reading is involved and we settled on the Build Your Library curriculum which has been great. They do include art, but it’s mostly along the lines of history and my 9 year old still loves craft projects.
That’s cool! The beautiful thing about homeschooling is that we can easily fit in more of what she’s passionate about.
The other day we were at Michaels and we came across these cute little signs that were only 99 cents. We grabbed a bunch to bring home and got busy creating.
We both made a few and the project changed as we went. I ended up making a ‘hello fall’ sign and one with her dance studio name on it. She was going to write something on hers, but when it was done, she had this beautiful galaxy design and she didn’t want to add any words.
She did, however, remember this cute little fairy rock she had sitting on her shelf and decided it would fit perfectly in the frame. In the end, she had a cute little piece of custom made décor for her room.
Want to make this yourself?
You really don’t need much. Click HERE for a list of things I got for this project from Michaels. Some of it I just have around so the only thing I really purchased for this activity specifically were the wooden signs themselves.
The first thing you do is pick your colors. Get creative! Kiddo really just put down splotches and blended them together. The result was really pretty.
I, on the other hand, had intended to blend some yellow and orange. It didn’t work as I had hoped so I just did the orange background, red for the sides, and brown around the edges.
The wood really soaked up the paint, so be prepared to do 2 or 3 coats (letting it dry in between) to get it more opaque.
When you have your main colors done, I used some paint pens to do my writing. I could have planned it out a little better and centered the letters, but I think I’m going to add some kind of embellishment in the blank spaces.
The Lesson of Creativity
These signs are really open for creativity. Like I said before, kiddo decided to skip the writing on hers and make it more of a shadow box. You could do a collage of trinkets glued to the background or just leave it painted to be a mini shelf.
That’s the beauty of a project like this. We took a blank canvas, has our own ideas, and we were both flexible as we went leaving our end results different than we had planned.
This is actually a really important part of art for children (and adults!). It’s easy to copy something or to get caught up in how it ‘should’ look.
That is not the meaning behind art at all. When we only give specific assignments with rules, it can stifle creativity.
I’m going to use an example from one of my college classes for my Early Education Degree. In the example, a child was given a coloring sheet of a rose. She chose to color that image blue. The teacher, instead of asking questions and getting the child to tell them about the rose and allowing them to explore their creativity by discussing their process, told her that roses cannot be blue, they are red.
Stop and think about that for a minute. Do you think that child will every color a rose anything other than red again? Will they freely use their creativity, or will they stop to think about what things ‘should’ be?
Kind of mind blowing, when you stop to think about it. A small, simple comment can do so much to shut down those creative pathways.
I do think it’s important to study art history and various styles and techniques, but I’m so glad we can intersperse activities like these where we can explore our creativity together.
Do you have kids? What’s your favorite art project that they’ve done?
