The Summer Holidays are here and the quest to keep little hands busy will begin. We’ve gathered some great ideas to keep your kids happy. Plus, the following ideas aren’t only fun to do, they’re also beneficial for developing your child’s cognitive, psychological and creative skills.

Creating The Good Kind of Scene

This one’s of our personal favourites, a DIY puppet theatre! You can make it as detailed as you want and add many textures and materials but the basics you’d really need for this are some good quality pencils like the Stabilo Carbothello pastel pencils. These are suited for any skill level and blend smoothly while still maintaining their true colours over time. For outlining we would suggest using the EASYgraph pencils. They’re ergonomic design will make hours of crafting easy and fun.

The all time classic: colouring pages

They’re part of your grandma’s, your friendly neighbour’s, probably even Kevin Bacon’s or Dame Helen Mirren’s childhood. You get the gist: many people have coloured some wonderful colouring pages whilst they were kids. And guess what, this activity isn’t only good for color awareness, recognition and discernment; but it is also a convenient activity that’ll keep the little ones busy. You don’t need a ton of materials to start one and that makes ideal for when you’re traveling this summer.

These two beautiful examples are done with the Chameleon Color Tones. We think these pens are absolutely brilliant for two reasons: you get great, vibrant colours that glide on paper but you can also create gradients and tonal variations. The later will make colouring so much more exciting that when using your ordinary colours.    

Chalkboard fun

Chalkboards are known for improving hand-eye coordination. Another plus of investing in a product like these is the sustainability. You’re not wasting tons of paper as you can wipe off previous drawings or words and start from scratch again.  

This chalkboard set comes with it’s own wet-wipe chalk pen. And you know what that means? Not a single particle of dust like you’d get from regular chalk art works. If you want to clean the wet-wipe pen from your chalkboard, the only thing you’d need is water and a cloth or sponge. Talk about efficiency!

A Rock Solid Arts and Crafts

We’ve included this fun idea because we think the craft materials you need for this are very accessible and don’t take up a lot of space. You can find rocks literally lying around and it can be made part of the activity to let your children search for the perfect stone to create their artwork on. Once they’re happy with the stone they’ve found you can grab your chalk or paint pens and start creating. The main benefit of theses pens is that they are great on so many non-porous surfaces!

We recommend to use pens that are waterproof so the little creations don’t wash off when exposed to water. Posca has a great range of pens that will be perfect for this.

Keeping little ones busy by doing activities that are both fun and good for their personal development is something we believe is important. We hope these ideas will lead to many original creations and lots of smiles.