A Non-Craft

I love the idea of crafts, but I have never been very good at transforming ideas into action. So I do not do crafts with Gus nearly as much as I would like. (I think I need to get a book. I don't really come up with my own ideas, and the internet is generally too overwhelming for this sort of thing!) However, I did see this on Pinterest the other week and thought it was easy enough that even I could do it! And I made it even easier, for good measure ;)

Gus with his bus

You can't see the bus too well in the picture, but basically all I did was draw a big bus on a blank piece of paper. I had originally planned to print one off the internet, like this one, but I thought it would be quicker just to draw it. My drawing wasn't spectacular, bus Gus knew it was a bus, and that was all that mattered. I just made sure that the bus took up as much of the page as possible, then drew two rows of windows, to make it a double-decker.

Next, we grabbed a stack of magazines and started tearing / cutting out pictures of people and animals to go on our bus. The plan was to glue or tape them in the windows of the bus, as if the passengers were looking out the windows. But Gus wasn't that fussed about this being a realistic representation, so we just pasted them wherever.

The thing I loved about this activity was that it was super-simple, but the pay-off for this bus-loving boy was huge! He loved this bus. For the rest of the day, and even a few days after, he kept saying "Look at your [my] bus!" and including it in our play, as can be seen by the animals in the above picture looking at the bus.  I think children really enjoy being able to create things, especially those that they see every day. Now, not every child is bus-mad like mine, but I think this would also work really well with a picture of a house or airplane or castle or something like that.

Happy (non-)crafting!