No, I didn’t let my kids go to my hard wood floors with their multiple sets of Crayola markers.  But they did color on the floor, over six feet of it.

This is quite possibly one of my favorite things to do with my kids.  What starts out as a way to entertain them, inevitably leads to the entire family sitting on the floor.  Tracing hands, tracing toes, seeing who can draw the best elephant (long story…  ).  Wondering what we were doing?

Well, this mom was using up her leftover gift wrap and my girls were using up their daily dose of creative juices.

While cleaning the craft room after Christmas, I found several rolls of odd ball gift wrap.  Today’s roll was leftover from our youngest daughter’s first birthday.  There’s only so many places you can use “First Birthday” paper!

We take the leftovers  and tape them to our hard wood floors (it does work on carpet if you have better tape than just gift tape).  I break out the bucket of plastic stencils we have (from the dollar store!) and a tub of markers and off they go!

We have animal stencils, abc stencils, and shape stencils.  We practice making “scenes”, writing our names, or stacking shapes to create bigger pictures. For example, Sammy learned that if you take a big square and draw a triangle on top of it you get a “house” shape!

Clean up is a snap!  If you don’t want to just throw away their masterpiece you can hang it in a hallway, or use it to wrap up a gift for grandparents (artwork side out).  You can also roll it up and store it inside the cardboard tube the wrap came on.  Unroll it next year to see how much they changed and grown.

Need a few new tricks for this old game?

~ Cover the floor with layers of newspaper and gift wrap….  pass out paper plates of finger paint and use your fingers and toes to draw!

~ Make rules where you can only draw with your “non writing” hand, or you have to hold the marker with your toes.

~ Use it as a creative way to teach… colors, shapes, numbers, letters….even addition and subtraction!

~ Use rubber stamps, or household sponges, fruits, veggies, etc.  dipped in paint or ink pad.

Have fun and Happy Coloring!!

Share This

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Random, Good to Know, A day in the life of being a Mommy!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.