Craft activities are a fantastic way to engage foster children in a creative and imaginative process while having loads of fun. Whether it’s a rainy day, a weekend at home, or a special event like a birthday party, these craft activities will keep the little ones entertained for hours.
Paper Plate Monsters
Use ordinary paper plates picked up from the supermarket and turn them into colourful and wacky monsters!
Provide your foster children with paper plates, markers, googly eyes, colourful tissue paper, and glue. Encourage them to use their imagination and create unique monster faces by drawing, cutting, and sticking various features onto the plates. They can give their monsters funky names and even come up with stories about their creations.
DIY Dreamcatchers
Introduce children to the art of creating beautiful dreamcatchers. Gather materials such as coloured wool, beads, feathers, and embroidery hoops. Show them how to weave the yarn in intricate patterns around the hoop, incorporating beads and feathers along the way. Hang the finished dreamcatchers in their bedrooms to catch bad dreams and bring good ones.
If you have never made a dreamcatcher before, don’t worry, it’s super easy. YouTube has lots of videos, such as this one.
Nature Collage
Take children on an outdoor adventure to collect natural materials such as leaves and flowers, twigs, and bark. Back indoors, provide them with cardboard, glue, and scissors. They can use all their found materials to create a fun collage. Rolls of lining paper are cheap and make excellent backing paper for collages. Lay out a plastic sheet indoors or let your foster children have fun in the garden making their nature-inspired collages. They can add paint, crayon marks, and more to finish off their artwork.
Handprint Animals
Unleash your foster child’s inner artist by turning their handprints into adorable animals. Use washable paints in various colours and have them make handprints on paper. Once dry, they can transform the handprints into animals by adding eyes, ears, tails, and other features using markers or coloured paper. From handprint butterflies to handprint lions, the possibilities are endless!
Iced Lolly Stick Puppets
Encourage storytelling and imaginative play by making popsicle stick puppets from discarded iced lollypop sticks. Provide children with sticks, construction paper, markers, and glue. They can design and create characters such as animals, superheroes, or even aliens, by cutting out shapes from the paper and decorating them. Once the puppets are complete, they can put on a puppet show for you.
Upcycled Bird Feeders
Teach children the importance of recycling while attracting feathered friends to the garden. Collect empty plastic bottles, wooden spoons, and garden twine. Cut a hole in the bottle, insert the spoon as a perch, and hang it outside using the twine. Fill the bottle with birdseed, and watch as birds visit their new feeding station.
If you are thinking of becoming a foster carer, speak to a foster agency like fosterplus.co.uk to learn more. Foster carers perform a very worthwhile service and if you have a spare room and some love to offer, you can make a difference to a child’s life.
Craft activities provide foster children with an outlet for self-expression and creativity. They also help develop fine motor skills, problem-solving abilities, and patience. So, gather the materials, set up a crafting station, and let your foster children have some fun.
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