How To Keep Children Busy With Scrapbooking

Holidays can be extremely long and this is especially true if you have kids who are constantly complaining of boredom. Here are some fun ways to keep children busy using scrapbooking, and you can all do it together.

My four year old daughter was lucky enough to get a children's scrapbooking kit for Christmas. It consisted of a box with a whole lot of punched pages that we joined together to make a mini booklet. The kit also contained small embellishments, ribbons, stickers and dye cuts.

I quickly printed out some photographs from my computer for her to use and she had a ball doing up her scrap book. It kept her busy all afternoon and a few days later she is still adding finishing touches here and there each time she walks past it. She takes great pride in showing it off to all our visitors and it is like a never ending source of amusement to her.

While she enjoyed herself, I was able to complete a few layouts of my own, which I normally don't get a chance to.

All children love working with their hands and making pretty or practical things. Give them the help they need, but try not to tell them how to do each detail. Let them decide where they would like to put a sticker or let them color in the sun purple if that is how they want to do it. In this way you will see how their imagination can work for them, instead of how you want their imagination to work. I made the mistake of saying to my daughter "if I were you I wouldn't put quite so many stickers on that page," to which she replied "Well, you are not me!"

Here are some cheap scrapbooking ideas and solutions that you can use to keep your kids entertained for hours.

1. Give them all your scraps of patterned paper from your kit that you no longer need. Encourage them to make their own backgrounds for their layouts by sticking the scraps together in patterns. You will be amazed at what they can come up with.

2. Give them their own tools, like child friendly scissors, glue, gel pens, rulers ect. In this way they will feel special as they will have their own kits, just like Mom.

3. There are loads of cheap stickers which can be bought and used. Children love stickers of their favorite TV characters or even of butterflies or teddy bears to decorate their layouts.

4. Do a family layout. Next time you visit somewhere special, tell your children to collect souvenirs that they can use in a layout. These can be coasters, tickets, flowers, shells or whatever tickles their fancy's. When you get home you can then join all the memorabilia together and create a joint layout.

5. Cut shapes from scraps of material for them to play with and scrap. My four year old really enjoyed this.

6. Mini albums usually work better for the younger children, as it doesn't take so long to complete a page.

With just a little imagination, it needn't be expensive to entertain your children during the holidays, and the hours will be well spent.

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