We bring you some fun creative activities for families with young children from our team of Early Years specialists – something to explore together during these extraordinary times!
Family Fun Fridays will take you on a journey of creating art with nature, marbling paper with items found in your kitchens, explore shadows and shapes, tell stories, make books and more.
We hope that you all keep safe and healthy, entertained and happy!
There will be five activities in total, being released one each Friday in May, starting on Friday 1st May. We had project planned for families this summer, which is now on hold, but get in touch if you want to join us when we can meet again.
These activities have been supported by the Ragdoll Foundation.
29th May ‘Bookmaking!
For our final activity we’re showing you how to make a simple book with craft items that you might find around the house. Click here for step by step instructions and have fun!
’22nd May ‘Shadows!’
Our fourth installment of fun creative activities for families with young children is from Karl, Frances & Margit – our Early Years specialists. Playing with light and creating shadows at home is one of the simplest and most satisfying creative activities that we can all do. It’s lots of fun and is bursting with open-ended opportunities for children of all ages to explore.
15th May ‘Marbling!’
This week our Family Fun Friday activity is Marbling! We’ve adapted the original activity from For the Love of Books to use things found around the home. We were particularly inspired by a book called ‘Space Walk’ by Salina Yoon and in the project we went on to make an interactive creative play space for the children to explore life on another planet.
8th May ‘Hapa Zome!’
Family Fun Friday this week brings you Hapa Zome – a wonderfully therapeutic way to decorate fabric scraps or paper. You can even use the results to make your own bunting to commemorate Victory in Europe day!
1st May ‘Wild Art’!!
There is an activity card to give you ideas and tell you what you need, and a photo card for inspiration – you can also watch Frances’ video demo! Click here for the Wild Art activity post!
For the Love of Books project manager Karl Harris tells us a bit more about designing the activities:
“When it became apparent that we would all be living under various lockdown conditions for some time I called Sophie at HPCA and we decided to put out some activities for people at home at the moment with young children. For the Love of Books is a tried and tested project, so I contacted two of the delivery artists, and we worked together to come up with a special version for these times. For the Love of Books took a series of age-range specific books and produced open-ended and fun creative activities from the content. These activities don’t replicate those sessions exactly but we were very fond of some of the ideas that we had devised so we looked more closely at some of them.”
About the team
Karl Harris, Frances Walker and Margit van der Zwan have worked together for the last three years on our very successful For The Love Of Books project, partnering with nurseries and other early years settings. Karl coordinated the production of the activities and said, “Our original roles and creative delivery skills were all thrown up in the air and Margit the musician became Margit the illustrator, Frances the creative play expert became Frances the video blog presenter, and I tackled my fear of technology head on and learnt how to use a computer far better than I’ve ever done before!”
About the activities
Karl says:
“We’ve designed Family Fun Fridays with activity cards and videos to engage and entertain all members of the household. Activities are open-ended, using items that can easily be found around the house and garden – or on your daily exercise outdoors. We want to big up our beautiful High Peak flora and fauna, and appreciate how the natural world can nurture the creativity and wellbeing of a new generation.
You won’t find any colouring-in sheets or word searches here but we will instead be taking you on a journey of creating art with nature, marbling paper with items found in your kitchens, explore shadows and shapes, tell stories, make books and more. We hope that you all keep safe and healthy, entertained and happy, and we really look forward to working with you all again on a new project that was originally scheduled for this summer but is now on hold for the time when we can meet again.”
Karl Harris | Margit van der Zwan | Frances Walker
