Children’s Art Cards

The summer holidays are over, and the kids are back at school – I will miss the morning lie-ins, but I confess that it’s with something of a sigh of relief that I’ve waved them back to school – at least now I can get on with the huge backlog of tasks that have lain undone for weeks while they were off. Their childhood is so different from my own. Summer holidays as I remember them were ones where we were left almost totally to entertain ourselves, whereas now I seem to be my children’s entertainment manager.

Of course there are lots of traditional games which kids have made use of in the past to entertain themselves indoors when the weather is not so good. I remember playing simple card games with my friends, or Solitaire by myself, and these Art Cards cards also offer a more creative, DIY version of some of those games like Snap, or memory games where you match the pairs. They are really simple to make too – you can either create your own template, or alternatively use the template I made which you can find below. Just click on the image, then right click to download for printing.

These frames also have lots of different uses, as cards, labels or gift-tags ready to print out and personalise.

Each template sheet (which I printed onto thin card), has 6 frames, and I gave my 2 boys 2 sheets each to fill in. Once they’d filled in the frames with their artwork (we used pencil crayons, felt tips, stamps and wax crayons for this) I photocopied each sheet once, again onto thin card, so that I had a total of 48 cards. (Alternatively you could use 1 sheet each, and photocopy them twice, which might work better for the game of Snap).

I glued each completed template onto a sheet of decorative scrap-booking paper which I had in my stash. This was quite sturdy, so gave the cards more stability, and then cut the sheet up so that the cards were all the same size. If you want the cards to be protected a little more and so last longer, you  could give them a coat of varnish, or alternatively laminate them.

My boys really enjoyed playing with their very own extra special art cards!