During the Summer holidays do you plan an outing everyday for your kids?  I don’t because I think it’s important for kids to have unstructured play time.  By that I mean simply spending time at home and letting them use their imaginations to just play.  By planning too many activities and trying to fill every minute of their time, I think kids lose the ability for creative play.  So at our house, we tend to mix it up – a few planned outings each week and lots of home time in between.  For home time I like to have a few things up my sleeve to help keep Anya occupied and one of her favourite things to do is work her way through a kids activity book.

I recently came across this really fun and creative activity book called Tate kids Modern Art activity book and it sounded really good so I bought it.  It’s by the Tate Gallery and includes lots of fun activities based around the modern artists of out time.   This book isn’t about drawing and colouring within the book, but its a book of arty ideas that can help you come up with even more creative and fun ideas.  Some of the suggestions would also make fun party or play date activities especially for crafty kids.  So for e.g. you have things like a Henri Matisse activity where you’re encouraged to paint pieces of paper in the brightest, boldest colours like Matisse’s famous colourful collages and perhaps make an animal shaped collage of your own.  Or a Salvador Dali art project where you cut out pictures from magazines and then mix and match the most unlikely pairs.

Anya is really enjoying this Tate Kids Modern Art Activity Book which comes in especially handy when we don’t have a planned day and also on rainy days.  The collage activities have appealed to her the most so far.  Our home is already full of all kinds of collages and we’ve only had the book a few days.  But there are lots of other fun ideas in this kids activity book all of which are engaging, creative and fun to do.

{all photos by ebabee}