Easy Crafts For Children – Cereal Box Theatre.

We had only been home from our little holiday an hour or so when Freya started rooting about in our little stash of crafting bits and bobs for something to make.

Luckily, instead of recycling useful cereal boxes I have been hiding them away since the start of the summer holidays and so, like some sort of amazing magician, I was able to pull the boxes out of a hat/cardboard box under the dining table.

“Ta daaaaa!” She looked distinctly unimpressed when I held up an old corn flakes box like it was baby Simba in the Lion King.

“Let’s make a theatre and we can put on a play.” Got a warmer response.

I undid the box and turned it inside out so we had the lovely plain cardboard as the outside and then cut a chunk out of the front.

While I was doing that I got Freya to paint a backdrop to stick in. Originally I envisaged a magical Tinkerbell-inspired fairyland, as that was the play she wanted to put on, but she just wanted to paint it purple. Purple it was.

While that was drying I looked up “free fairy silhouettes” on the iPad and then traced a couple on to the leftover cardboard, which she then coloured in.

As she was colouring she kept mentioning other characters who were in the play (I wish I’d seen the script) including a unicorn, a witch, a princess and a squid (?!) so I diligently set about making those too.

I attached them all to lolly sticks but then found that she wasn’t quite able to get her hand inside the theatre so we just used that as a backdrop. It actually worked ok because the story took a sudden twist and was now an underwater adventure – maybe I should have expected that with the squid? I was able to pull in the aquarium we’d made in a similar fashion one Sunday morning and use that. The story switched between the two.

It’s been good fun – although one of the fairies turned out to be a ninja (?!) and the unicorn, played by yours truly, had to race in and tell her off for hitting.

As a follow up we visited the Theatre Royal, Norwich during their open day and enjoyed a behind-the-scenes tour (and free ice-cream and face painting). It’s safe to say, Freya loved it (I practically had to drag her off the stage) – and that was before we even got to the bit where you could try on costumes.

In other fun/shocking news, I’m now a Bostik Blogger, which means we will be receiving a box of crafts in the post each month and we have to make something on a different theme (don’t worry, I sent some links of our previous efforts after we were invited and they were still happy to have us!). We’ve just had our first one and it was so much fun (there was Fimo and I’ve never used Fimo before). Look out for regular crafting posts.