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For anyone who thinks that arts & crafts projects have to be complicated, let me tell you this is not true. Kids can be very creative if you give them the materials.
My daughter's teacher recently asked for coffee filters for a class project. I happen to have a cabinet full of coffee filters I don't need. (A broken coffee maker, a replacement that didn't make hot coffee, and a second replacement that came with one of those lifetime filters, and I have 2 kinds of filters in packs of 200 each.) So, as soon as I got them out of the cabinet, my kids were interested. (The introduction of any new item in our home sparks questions.) I gave them each one of the cone-style filters and told them they could make something with it.
They immediately went to for the crayons and pencils and decorated their filters until they were satisfied.
"Now what can we do with them?"
"I don't know," I said. "What do you think you could do with them?" I opened one up to show them it was not just a triangle. Their eyes lit up. They ran upstairs and came back with their favorite little puppy stuffed animals.
"Sleeping bags!"
It was a great idea, but the puppies were a little too big for the filters. Hmmm.
"I need scissors," may daughter said. "I'm going to make a skirt!" She trimmed the small end of the filter to make a hole, and slipped the filter over her puppy's head. She stopped, seemingly satisfied with it being a cape instead of a skirt. "Now I need to cut holes for the hands."
I left her to her filter-fashions. (My son had lost interest after the sleeping bag idea, and was now playing with his puppy.)
"Can I have some tape?" was her next request.
"What are you going to do with tape?"
"I'm making a new sleeping bag." She had decorated plain paper with flowers and hearts and was ready to tape two pieces together to make a bigger sleeping bag. I gave her the tape.
So the puppy now sits on our coffee table wearing a beautiful filter cape, sleeping in a lovely paper sleeping bag. My kids both had fun making up stories about puppy sleepovers, and I had about 30 minutes of mostly-free time. Not a bad impromptu arts & crafts project.
