Free Fun - Animal craft for a toddler

I LOVE crafting with my kiddo. I really wish we spent more time on arts and crafts but it's so much easier to do other things instead. I just need to sit down and plan crafts for the week or the month and I fully intend to! Even so we have tons of fun when we get around to it. I had it in my mind that I wanted to go through all my pins on pinterest this week and get some creative juices flowing. I had an older pin with a craft that was too difficult for him that I decided to transform so that he could still do it. The transformation made it so simple but he had a ton of fun.

The original craft had an outline of an animal on paper and the idea was to fill the outline in with paper strips. There isn't a sufficient link attached to the pin otherwise I'd link it for you. We will most likely do something of this sort together when he's a little bit older, but for now, at just 2 years old (I'm holding onto that until the day he turns 3) our version worked out much better.

This was a "free fun" activity because I cut two cardboard pieces off of a box I received a package in. I used a catalog to cut the strips (junk mail). Apart from the paint brush I had in a drawer and the elmers glue that I also had, there's nothing I would have needed to purchase for this craft. I put a very small amount of elmers glue into a small bowl and added about 2 times as much water. I'm guessing my solution was 1 part glue 2 parts water... maybe even more water. The ratio isn't super important. Little Abe used the paint brush to paint one piece of the cardboard with the glue water. Then he got to cover the cardboard with paper strips, much like with paper mache. We continued to paint the paper strips with the glue water as we put more and more on. You want to cover each paper strip with the glue water so that it will both lay flat on the cardboard and so that any strip that gets laid over that piece also has glue to adhere to.

This is our finished and dried part one masterpiece. When it comes to a 2 year old the simplest things can be loads of fun. He really enjoyed doing this craft. I asked him which animal he wanted to turn this into and he picked an elephant. I drew an outline of an elephant on the second piece of cardboard (from that box I cut up) and cut the outline out. Then I just glued the elephant piece on top of little Abe's paper strips masterpiece. And whala! It looks pretty good hanging on his bedroom wall beneath the alphabet letters and he's proud of his hard work.

Average daily spending for 2015: $19.25