Keeping the kids occupied during school holidays and on wet weekends can be a challenge, which is why it's handy to have a box of baking essentials or art and craft supplies to hand for when they start moaning 'I'm bored!' Crafting and baking with kids is a fun and relaxing way to spend time together. Here are some of our favourite kids' craft and activity packs...
For themed craft sets
Whether it's Halloween, autumn, Diwali, or Christmas craft sets you're after over the coming weeks, Baker Ross has you covered. We love their selection of DIY decorations for all occasions, made from wood, foam, or ceramic. The Halloween Craft-it! Box comes with two Halloween wreath kits to peel and stick, a foam haunted house kit to build and decorate, a sticker sheet and activity book. This is currently reduced from £12.95 to just £5.95. My six-year-old son Reuben enjoyed making the haunted house (I had to help with assembling it as it's quite tricky to push the little bits of foam through the small holes). But he loved adding all the peel and stick embellishments and creating a haunted town diorama, also using Baker Ross's Halloween Mummy Weaving Decoration Kit (£5.95 for a pack of five). You could place a little LED tea light inside your haunted house for added eerie effect. When it comes to Christmas crafts, we love the paint your own Christmas Present Ceramic Tea Light Holder (£5.95 for a pack of two) and to accompany this, we recommend the Christmas Multi-Purpose Deco Acrylic Paint Pot Pack 20ml (£7.95 for a pack of 10), as this contains festive shades of green and red, and metallic gold and silver. Reuben also enjoyed creating the Winter Ice Skating Colour-in 3D Scene Kit (£5.95 for a pack of two) but he did need my help to attach the little characters to their paper stands. For more everyday craft kits, we love Baker Ross's cute little Paint your own Mini Porcelain Tea Set, which is sure to keep your child occupied as they first paint their tea set and then settle down for afternoon tea with their teddies. All these little kits make for great ways to keep kids occupied, and they could also make for nice little stocking fillers. Or there are plenty of colouring in and sticker scene packs on offer if you're looking for something to add a little fun to a child's Christmas dinner place setting.
To see the full range of what's on offer, visit here
For basic supplies
When it comes to affordable basic art and craft supplies, The Works is a great place to look. From canvases, to paper, paint and brushes, you'll find what you need for all crafting ages. We love the range of what's on offer for little ones. The Mega Paint Sticks and Card Bundle, priced £10, comes with 30 sheets of white A4 paper, a pack of 15 colouring pencils, a pack of chunky paint sticks, and a pack of neon poster paint sticks. Paint sticks are perfect for allowing little ones to get creative without creating too much mess. And every art box needs a supply of white A4 paper. This great value pack makes a nice gift. Kids can also unleash their creativity with the Giant Box of Craft Supplies, from The Works. This comes at the great value price of just £5 and contains supplies to keep little crafters occupied for hours. It includes things like glitter glues, different coloured and textured card and tissue paper, cards, envelopes, pom pots, sequins and googly eyes. It also contains a small bottle of glue. But we prefer to use our beloved glue gun. Reuben really enjoyed using this craft box to create his own card for a friend's birthday, and he went wild with the googly eyes when creating Halloween crafts. The Works also does a cute Colour Your Own Festive Christmas Jigsaw Puzzles. This comes in a pack of three and costs £1.50, making it a perfect little gift to tuck into your child's Christmas Eve box. Find their full range of product here.
For the bath and beyond
Hooded Owls is a brand that does all sorts of products for bathtime fun, from bath toys, to fizzing bath dust and bath bombs. But it's their potion kits will really excite kids, and these can be used in or out of the bath. Reuben spent hours enjoying the Boil and Bubble Halloween Playtime Potion Kit at the kitchen table. It costs £35 and comes with a little cauldron, pipette, mini spoon, bamboo tongs and stirring sticks, alongside seven pots of potion ingredients, including Witch's Charms (mini bath bombs), Popping Pumpkins (fizzing bath salts), Hidden Horror (Reuben enjoyed discovering the tiny spiders and eye balls hiding in this pot of fizzing bath salts), Spooky Spells (coloured rice), Vampire's Curse (fizzing bath dust), Goblin's Earwax (coloured soap flakes), and Dragon's Blood (red bubble bath).
Reuben conjured up several frothy spellbinding concoctions, and stirred up the excitement of Halloween with this great sensory play kit. And there are other potion kits to choose from, including Dragon Inferno and Colour Explosion. Refill packs are also available to purchase. Hooded Owls will soon be announcing its Christmas Potion Kit, so keep your eyes peeled here.
For getting outdoors
Create a sense of wonder and develop an interest in nature with Arcana Living's recently launched Curiosity Club, a letterbox sized subscription designed for children aged 7-12. The beautiful monthly pack contains nature-inspired activities, and focuses on what's happening with wildlife during the current season. Our pack came with a Discovery Guide for Early Autumn, and was filled with lots of facts about what animals you can find and where, why leaves change colour, how spiders make webs, and mindfulness activities. There was also a Field Journal for your child to take with them on an autumn walk and log what they see and find, and there are little experiments for them to carry out. The Curiosity Club encourages kids to observe colours, patterns and shapes, and engage all the senses. It's a wonderful way to help children learn to really observe and appreciate what's going on in the natural world around them, and to promote calmness. There were also stickers in our pack, a postcard with a picture of a squirrel to colour in, and a beautiful autumnal-themed little patch to sew on to cloth. The subscription costs £18.50 per month (first month half price). Find out more here.
For tickling your taste buds
Baked by Steph create some great DIY icing kits that are also really tasty. Both Reuben and my nine-year-old son Odhran had great fun with the Haunted House DIY Icing Kit. It comes with pre-baked cookie bases and three bags of pre-made royal icing (in three different colours), making it super simple to put together. There was a practice icing sheet, but Odhran and Reuben were keen to dive straight in. They decorated each base separately and waited for them to dry before putting the whole thing together. The kit comes with extra cookies in the shape of a bat, a tombstone, and a ghost.
The boys used the piping (squirting some into their mouths as they worked!) and the sprinkles provided, to create their design. But we also had some Halloween-inspired sweets from Bebeto. So, they decided to add them to their haunted house.
Once it was done and left to dry, the boys didn't spend much time admiring their creation, and decided instead to tuck straight in, taking huge bites out of the structure. I had a taste of myself, and found it to be deliciously sweet and buttery. With careful design and the resisting the urge to tuck in, this would make a lovely party centrepiece. The Haunted House DIY Icing Kit is priced £24. For Christmas, there's a Gingerbread House DIY Kit. Find the full range of what's on offer here.
For something magical
Your child will be in wizarding heaven when they open the Frog Froth Potion Kit from The Potion Lab. The box itself is enticing and the package has been put together with care. The little scroll and the old-worldly feel of the potion labels adds to the sense of magic and intrigue. The kit costs £31 and contains a small cauldron, a wooden magic wand, Frog Froth recipe scroll, Unicorn Horn Powder, Dragon's Blood, Troll Wee, Fairy Dust, Gilly Weed, Mermaid Tears and Phoenix Features. For an extra cost you can add the four colours - Vampire Blood (red), Blue Moon Elixir (blue), Serpents Venom (yellow) and Pickled Newt (green). And there's the option to personalise the kit at an extra cost. It's been designed with sustainability in mind and comes with a refill list, allowing you to easily and affordably replenish ingredients from your own home. The ingredients are kept in little glass bottles, making this a kit designed to last a lifetime. It's the perfect activity pack for, not just Harry Potter fans, but for any kid who loves to pour and mix and bubble and brew. Let the imaginative play begin! The Potion Lab also do a Rainbow Fizzing Potion Kit and Volcano Fizzing Potion Kit if they're more your child's thing. Click hereto find out more.
For FREE fun
Download Take a Break's FREE puzzles pack for kids, carefully crafted to keep them entertained this half term. Find out more here.
Remember: Keep your crafting supplies replenished with items from around the house that you might otherwise throw away. For example, the cardboard inside toilet rolls, eggs cartons, and ice-lolly sticks. And search outdoors for other items that you could use to create something special, such as autumn leaves. And search on Pinterest, Insta and TikTok for kid crafting inspiration.