SCHOOL HOLIDAYS ARE HERE!!!

School holidays have started, so the usual panic of what to do to keep the kids occupied for nearly 6 weeks has started in lots of households up & down the country. My answer to that is to get creative. Most children like getting messy - glueing and painting, creating and generally using their imagination in an expressive way.

So, not a photography post from me this week - I've let my children come up with some ideas...

Their playroom is now an art gallery. Decorated using pictures created by my 2 & 6 year olds, a whole wall is now awash with colour. I love it!

This isn't as awful as it may first seem. They had loads of fun painting outside and once dry the pictures are all bluetacked on one wall. They even got to choose where each picture went. If you don't have a playroom, then a room you're planning to decorate or a spare bedroom will be fine. Just somewhere they can keep the pictures up for a few days. My 6 year old has even invited a friend over to view her 'exhibition'.

If you don't have the space for a full wall 'exhibition', then what about trying one of these ideas:

• Get a pack of coloured chalks & let them do some pavement art on your patio or pathway in your garden. Let them go completely mad & don't forget to take a photograph before the rain comes.
• Do a series of footprints on paper, cut them out and lay trails on the floor around the house or bluetack a display around a door frame in their bedroom.
• Junk modelling is always good fun. Give them your old cereal boxes, toilet roll tubes, yogurt pots, some masking tape and set them a challenge (biggest robot or create a zoo animal)
• Get creative in a clean way. Invite all their friends over with their lego & get them to build the biggest tower/funfair ride/elephant/house EVER!
• Lend them your camera (under supervision of course) and have a photo day. Kids seem to love cameras & so long as you give them plenty of interesting things to photograph then it'll keep them busy for the day. Increase the activity by printing out their best photographs and making a collage of them.
• A baking day. Make some biscuits and let them go wild with some icing.

I'm sure there are a lot more great ways to get creative with the children & I would like to invite the other a Womans Work contributors and fans to share their ideas. Come on, get creative with the kids...

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http://www.sarahleighphotography.co.uk/

Photographer specialising in natural photographs of children and families in East Anglia.