Photograph courtesy of Jen Dalton
If you’re like us, you have a pantry full of dry goods just waiting to be used (and a bored kid or two just waiting to be entertained). But the myriad online resources for kid crafts are overwhelming, and not exactly feasible at the moment if they require multiple trips to Hobby Lobby. That’s why Local 12 WKRC-TV traffic anchor Jen Dalton decided to pull together her own list of kid-friendly science experiments, recipes (ice cream in a bag!), and art projects keyed to elementary-aged kids looking for a little crafty fun. “I started looking at things on Pinterest to do with my son,” Dalton says, “Because at that point, when we were first sent home, I thought, I need something to keep his little hands and his little mind busy.”
Dalton was getting plenty of ideas, but not a lot of direction. She thought that other parents must be in similar straits, so she decided to start pulling together resources that she knew would work at home. “My method really was that I was getting dozens of ideas from the school and social media,” Dalton says. “It was overwhelming. It was like, Here are 40 websites to choose from, on just math! And another 100 on crafts! My method was, I’m going to try and go through these things and see what are some projects that would be easily accomplished at home, during quarantine, with minimal ingredients and materials—what I have on-hand.”
She did just that, and the result is a fun list of easy projects for you and your kids. So bust out a few of those emergency lentils and try your hand at sprouting seeds sans soil. Or hustle up some used coffee grounds and a spare cup of flour to create a DIY dinosaur egg. You can find demos for all these crafts and more on Dalton’s social media Instagram and Facebook pages, where she tries them out with her own family (and Local 12 has kindly created a page to share them as well).
Check out these three crafts from Dalton’s Instagram page:
Explore how seeds germinate!
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Make your own ice cream in just five minutes!
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Make dinosaur eggs!
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