Craft for Babies

You may think that babies are too young to participate in craft projects, but there are plenty of craft ideas you can do with them.  Most ideas revolve around sensory stimulation - letting babies experience touch and textures of different materials.  As babies can be prone to putting things in their mouths, it makes sense that you use edible food for early craft, such as jelly, squirty cream, ice cream, pasta or rice.  Babies will enjoy the feel of foods, put them on newspaper on the floor and they will start to make their own art!  You don't want to introduce glue at this stage, but again you can improvise with edible glues.  A mix of flour and water will make an adequate glue for sticking pasta onto paper, you can also make edible glue from CMC powder used for cake decorating.  Of course babies won't be creating amazing pictures but they can play with layers of paper or foods that they can move around paper coated with an edible glue.

You can also do hand and foot painting, or create impressions in clays, with your baby, to create a lovely keepsake.  Again there are plenty of ways to make edible paints and clays - log into ToucanLearn and look under 'Fun Stuff' for recipes for both.  If you have a baby, register them in ToucanLearn and you'll be able to see plenty of other craft ideas and actvities to follow with them.

Baby craft sounds messy, and yes it is!  ...but your baby will enjoy sensory craft play and will begin to learn textures and develop their fine motor skills.