International Date to Create Day
We’re celebrating international Date to Create Day with a variety of creative activities you can use to help your child learn to read. Check out our many craft ideas for kids!
Reading and creativity often go hand in hand when dealing with young children. There are so many crafts for children that you and your child can engage in to celebrate your love of reading and creating. Encourage your child to develop a lifelong love of learning; all while spending quality time together.
When choosing a story and activity, try to choose a story that has some form of involvement for your child. If your child can participate in reading the story, they may feel more excited to read it. These books are also great for teaching emergent readers. It’s easy for them to recognize words they have learned in previous parts of the book and apply them later.
Kids will have loads of fun with Red Cat Reading books!
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Go on a Scavenger Hunt
Activities can be as simple or as elaborate as you want them to be. Did you recently choose to read a story about an adventure? A great activity for that is to create a scavenger hunt. Leave clues for your child, such as creating a simple rhyme to complete to find the location of the next clue. The clues should help them figure out where the next clue could be, getting them ever closer to the prize. The prize could even be a new story!
Play Grocery Store
Reading an alphabet book? Create a fun activity by playing grocery store by cutting out pictures of food from a newspaper advertisement or magazine, and pretending to “shop!” Or make an “A-Z Collage” by cutting out pictures and gluing them to a poster board. This will help children learn about letters and spelling. You’ll come up with endless days of creation for kids.
Put on a Puppet Show
If you’ve read a book about animals or people, try putting on a puppet show! This is one of our favorite craft ideas for children. Kids will have a blast creating their own puppets and you can use a variety of materials – purchase some new tube socks or get some paper bags. Decorate them with anything you have; yarn, buttons, felt, pipe cleaners! Decorate a large cardboard box or sheet for your puppet theatre, and re-enact the book together!
Illustrate a Story
Want more easy children’s crafts? Then you’ll love this creative suggestion. If you’ve been working through reading a lot of picture books with artwork that your child loves, you could always encourage them to write and illustrate their own story! If your child has a difficult time with spelling or writing, ask him or her what the story should say, write it down, and have him or her draw the pictures! Laminate the pages, and you will have a personal story that you and your child created together to read for a long time to come.
Whether you’ve picked up a stack of books at the library or signed up for a fun reading program to help your child learn to read (or read better!), activities that revolve around reading and being creative develop plenty of skills. Cognitive and critical thinking skills really help to foster that big imagination!
Check out our other blog posts for more arts and crafts ideas for kids!