Learn with Play at Home: Kid-made Greeting Cards. Patterned Paper Designs

Another birthday, another greeting card. We've tried a variety of different kid-friendly (actually doable by children) designs and wanted to try something new. I remembered some lovely patterned paper that I'd be saving to use for some sort of project, so decided a home-made birthday card would be perfect for it. With this particular gift card, we enjoyed combining and working on our design, drawing and cutting skills whilst inadvertently learning more about scale and measurement.

Ages: 3+

(See the Handy Tips at the bottom to simplify or extend to meet your child's needs)

Materials:

Piece of thick paper/card folded in half or a blank card
A variety of patterned paper or recycled artwork
Plain paper
Pen
Scissors
Glue

Directions:

Draw a design on your blank piece of paper
Replicate different parts of the design onto different colours/patterned paper so that each part is on a different style of paper.

Replicating the individual parts the same size as the original design and keeping the scale in line with each part is a challenging aspect of this activity. There may be some modifications to your original design, needed. This is valuable learning opportunity.

Once you've finished drawing, cut out the individual parts of your design

Reassemble the individual parts to form your design

Stick in place

Add in any extra details with a pen. You can also use stickers, stamps etc. to add any final touches to your gift card.

I thought he turned out pretty cute (slightly more E.T. like than the original dinosaur design, probably due to an added neck, haha).

Now your card is finished and ready to be written in. An important part of the whole greeting-card process for children is writing in the card. It is a fabulous time for them to practice and develop their writing, spelling and language.

Handy Tips:

- Simplify this activity by choosing a very simple design for your child to copy. Try a flower with different patterned petals or even just different geometric shapes cut out of each type of paper and arranged by the child. For very young children, do the cutting for them and allow them to arrange and paste on the patterned paper as they like.

- Extend this activity by working on more complex designs. Children can even work on lettering and making words out of the different patterned letters.

- Mix it up by using the same technique to make a personalised piece of art work. You could use this idea on canvas sealed with a clear finishing coat or even frame a piece of personalised paper with your design on it.

- Writing in the card is an important part of the process. To ease the pressure on younger children, it could be helpful to write your message on a separate piece of paper that you can stick inside the card. This way if there are any mistakes, it's easy to start over. For children that aren't writing yet, having them dictate a message that you write will help them learn the process.

- Some more Greeting cards that we've made and shared.