Crafty Craft Ideas for Children

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Recently I ran across a rash of great ideas for children.  From teaching tools to playtime fun, I hope you’ll find these as exciting for your children as I have.

Place setting template:

Trying to teach your children the proper placement for utensils at the table?  Try printing out this template from Martha Stewart.  Whether you decided to laminate it and practice with the real items, cut out the pieces and practice at the table or do a combination of both, your little peach will soon be showing off their new found societal skills at dinnertime!

Paper Dolls:

Do you ever dream about a simpler time when simpler things made life fun and full of wonder?  Why not offer a slice of imagination and nostalgia to your little girl with a paper doll set?  These fun and cute! sets will have her using her noggin instead of watching the TV in no time.

My favorite collection is from Families Online Magazine and offers the opportunity to color the collection before play.  How can you beat that?

For period pieces like Marie Antoinette and the Juke Box Era, check out Origami Bears where you will find a plethera of paper doll collections for view.

Feeling a little overwhelmed?  For beginners, check out About.com‘s collection of simple paper doll templates.  Ready to be printed, colored and designed.

Still searching for more?  Check out the Paper Doll Printables site collection at Teas2Dine4.com where site after site is listed for you to search your way to the perfect paper doll!  From Victorian to Barbie, whatever the style you want, you’ll find the site that has them here.

Have any crafty ideas for children?  Drop us a line, leave us a comment, let us know!

Kid Friendly FREE Fun

Since we are on a savings kick here at Homemaker’s Helper.  We thought we’d pass along some of the latest and greatest savings we could find.

Tops on our list is the FREE kids movies being offered this summer through Regal Entertainment.  You can expect your child to enjoy these top hit movies like:  Kit Kittredge: American Girl (G) & The Spy Next Door (PG) on one day or Jonah: A Veggie Tales Movie (G) & Monsters Vs. Aliens (PG) on another offered day….and besides, can you beat FREE?  To find out more, go to RegalEntertainment.com and click on the Free Family Fun Festival link.  You’ll be able to search based on your state and then locally.   It is a first come, first SEAT taken event (thank you for having it indoors where we won’t die from heat exhaustion!) offering…so get there early.

Another great freebie for the kids this summer is compliments of Kid-To-Kid resale shops.  Usually we mom’s are the first to swap out books, toys and clothes for out kiddos.  They just grow too fast!  Kid-To-Kid is as close to retail-mom-swapping-utopia as you can get without being free…until now.  If you pick up their FREE book club card, you can go into your local Kid-To-Kid resale shop and score one free book per month EVERY month all year long.  So go out there and fight illiteracy one free book at a time.

Ok, so this one is not necessarily for kiddos, but if you have them then you know how great Febreeze is!  Yesterday, we received a B1G1 (Buy One Get One Free) coupon for Febreeze Fabric Refresher through RedPlum home delivered coupons.  A search today of their online coupons at Redplum.com shows it does not show.  So keep that circular that should be showing up (if it didn’t yesterday) in your mailbox.

More savings sources to come…we are on a roll!

Wishing you a fantastic day…and many, many savings to come!

Top (Somewhat) Tame Halloween Movie Picks By Age or Chicken-ness!

Children’s:

1. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
2. Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters
3. It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown
4. Monsters Inc.
5. Winnie the Pooh Spookable Pooh
6. Clifford’s Big Halloween

Pre-Teens:

1. Monster House
2. Haunted Mansion
3. Casper
4. The Little Vampire
5. The Goonies
6. Neverending Story
7. Dragonheart
8. James and the Giant Peach

Teenagers:

1. Harry Potter (All)
2. Campfire Tales
3. Scooby Doo
4. Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein
5. Addam’s Family
6. Gremlins & Gremlins 2:  The New Batch
7. Beetlejuice
8. Edward Scissorhands

Adults:

1. Van Helsing
2. Sleepy Hollow
3. Underworld
4. High Spirits
5. Young Frankenstein
6. Clue
7. Ghostbusters
8. Willow
9. Scary Movie
10. Dracula:  Dead and Loving It
11. The Haunting
12. Queen of the Damned
13. Interview with the Vampire

Freezer Paper Find

Have you ever wondered what use freezer paper provides…especially in the 21st century?

I used to think freezer paper was for people who had never heard of vacuum sealing or freezer bags…or were still locked up in their homemade, 1950′s bomb shelter…

Anyway, I had purchased aluminum foil.  The box LOOKED like alumninum foil, but, “Suprise!”, it was freezer paper.  Ugh.

Being notoriously bad about returning items and having stared at the now infamous freezer paper for almost 6 months, I had to find some use, any use, for it.  At first, I secretly pretended I was a 1950′s housewife whose husband would appreciate the effort made to protect beautiful steaks from freezer burn.  Of course I snapped out of that real quick when he walked right past me and only mumbled “What a crappy day!.”

My daughter, on the other hand, became my inspiration…in a painful, childbirth sort of way.  She had taken her wonderful, “washable” markers and wrote all over the dining room table.  After removing the markings from the table and removing my daughter to her room, it came to me…”DUH!  Why not use the freezer paper to protect the table?”  In the process, I realized that placing it wax side up made for a cool, dry erase board for her also.  BONUS!!

Now she’s happy.  I’m happy.  I think I even heard the table sigh in relief, or was that me?

For more freezer paper finds, visit:

Awlafon’s 5 kids’ craft uses for freezer paper on Viewpoints.com.

From HGTV, get freezer paper notecards.

SuperCapes for SuperKids on Panjokids blog has amazing step-by-step instructions for creating your very own fabric stencils.  Your kids will love them; you’ll love the savings and the fun!

Find more fabric fun on DIYNetwork.com including how to put fabric through your inkjet!