Craft ideas for toddler?

[ImpYCelynAndTheIvy]

I really want to do some crafty things with my 2yo, but I have no imagination. I knit and occasionally make cards myself, but I always work from a pattern/design.

Can anyone recommend some things, or a good book of ideas please? I had a look in the Usborne books but I think they might be too difficult for DS.

Thanks :)

Have a look on activity village, they have some great ideas which I use for my 2 year old.

Also, at that age glue and some bits of sparkly paper to make a collage works, handprinting. Salt dough models (we just made some fab snowmen, with cotton wool around the bottom of them to make snow). Potato printing and wooden spoon puppets are quite popular too

I'll have a little think and see what else.

Thanks! Those sound like great ideas. I'm going to google how to make salt dough

google 'preschool craft activities'-I'm a Childminder and I'm always googling!!

.or www.theimaginationtree.com....they have loads of great stuff on here-I use it a lot.They have a facebook page.

It's simpler to cut pictures out of magazines and hand her a print stick. My 2yr old will happily do this for about 45mins.

Thought of fuzzy felt? Play dough? Go to hobby craft or elc, really not very hard. You aren't really trying to "make something" here. That implies rules/ridigity and she just needs to DO......

My tip for toddlers is to think about what they like to do/can do and then give them nice things to do it with if you want an "end result". At that age it's mostly if not all to do with the process for them and they find it difficult to do complicated series of processes or to work towards a fixed end product. Lots of toddler group activities were frustrating for mine and ended up a bit "stick that there, paint that bit". So we would end up with something that looked nothing like the example given but they'd had a lot of fun. Mine at two loved to paint things and put glue and glitter and bits and bobs on stuff. As I look round our Christmas decorated room I see candles made from various sizes of cardboard tubes painted and sprinkled (actually covered) with glitter. I added flame shapes made out of paper. They have also painted and stick things on photo frames, paper bags, canvases etc. If you want it to keep, choose the colours of paint, paper, glitter etc carefully. It really doesn't matter though-an end product that looks great to an adult is not important! Mine also loved playing with flour and pretend cooking with it.

Cut Christmas shapes out of cardboard (any box will do although plain both sides works best) give them a pritt stick to smear and then some glitter to shake over. Put a hole in the top and add some thread so you can hang them on the Christmas tree, or give them to proud Grandparents etc to hang on theirs.. I have some made by my children whne they were about 2 and they still look great on the tree 6yrs later

Thanks very much everyone! I wasn't necessarily hoping for an end product, but literally couldn't think of much beyond painting, crayons and play doh. I'm really not creative/artistic at all.

Clearly I need to stop recycling toilet rolls and magazines!

Toilet rolls some paint and some cotton your 2 year old can make a nice santa addition to the top of the Christmas tree we still have ours and that was 4 years ago!

toilet rolls are ace... we used this pinterest post as inspiration and made our own version, it looks really good and nothing like loo rolls. It hangs in our front window and neighbours and guests at a party were all asking about it.

My DD is 2 and loved painting the rolls [more on her than the rolls] and rolling out the berries for me. It was a joint effort but I pass all the credit to her as I wouldn't have even bothered if it wasn't for her desperate urge to paint things and cover it in glitter.

We've made pine cones decorated in glitter, which I saw on cbeebies this week, which are really nice and easy enough for her to do.

This week I plan on making jingle bells out of egg cartons.

I think it doesn't matter what it looks like as long as they have fun, keeping it simple means they don't loose interest. I found that doing an activity in stages means that she don't get bored easily or get frustrated with my demands to do this/that.

I've got a couple of books for inspiration, the preschoolers busy book is quite good when you are feeling stumped, it uses lots of things you'll have in the house. It's saved my bacon on the odd rainy day when we are winding each other up. They were bought second hand, I also have the toddler book and the arts and crafts one, but they are very similar.

Was just about to post about loo rolls as above! Did similar today but covered them in glitter glue and sequins and stapled them together :)

Love the wreath-not only clever but actually the first wreath I've seen that I fancy putting up in my home-apart from ds's paper plate one from Pre school!

These suggestions are amazing. Just what I was looking for . Thank you everyone xxxx