Guest Post - Taking Inspiration from our Colouring Quotes

 


Shelly and her kids colour and decorate some of Activity Village's Inspirational Colouring Quote pages in this guest blog post - a relaxed way to reinforce some spelling!

Out and About with our Scavenger Hunts


Taking Inspiration from Colouring Quote Pages

By Shelly

I love doing arts and crafts with my kids even if it does mean having glitter appear in strange places for days afterwards! I truly believe that kids learn a lot while they are being creative. But like most mums there are times when I need a non-messy activity. When my daughter was a lot younger we were on our way out to meet some friends and it was someone’s birthday so I quickly printed out a birthday colouring card and left her to colour it in while I sorted her brother (he was much younger then) and myself out. I still remember later on as we were sitting on the bus she started to proudly spell out the words from the card she had coloured in. It stuck with me and ever since then I have been a huge fan of colouring cards with the words on them – Happy Birthday, Happy Easter, and Merry Christmas. Anything really where the kids colour and decorate the words.

So I was thrilled when I noticed all the new Colouring Quote pages. Not only are the quotes inspirational, but the kids are colouring in and decorating words so it is a relaxed way of reinforcing some spelling.  I have printed out a few and left them in the kids art folder (we have an A4 sized lever arched file with colouring pages, templates, art ideas that I have printed out that sits on the kids bookshelf).

Examples of the colouring quotes pages in our folder
Examples of the colouring quotes pages waiting in our folder

Never Give Up - one of the colouring quotes pages
Never Give Up - one we did earlier!

The colouring quotes have been coloured in, painted in and a few have even been stuck up on their notice boards. But they have also been used for creative lettering. It started off very simply by the kids tracing over the exact words on the page.

Tracing the words "the sun will come out tomorrow"
Tracing the words "the sun will come out tomorrow"

The sun will come out tomorrow!
And colouring it in

I am a huge fan of tracing activities for kids. I have found that by tracing words and pictures the kids get more confident and often then naturally branch out and try and draw the letter or pictures by themselves. And that is exactly what happened with these. First the kids started by sticking with one page but only selecting one or two words and one or two pictures to make up their own picture.

Drawing her own sunshine quote page
Drawing her own sunshine quote page

Then my daughter started mixing up the words that she traced. She would trace over two words from two different colouring quote pages to get her own saying.

Tracing and mixing up words from the colouring quotes pages
Tracing and mixing up words from the colouring quotes pages

And she started adding in her own creative details to the words that she had traced. And after she got a bit more confident she started inserting some of her own words in between the traced words.

Combining traced words into her own design
Combining traced words into her own design

I loved this.  It is a simple, easy art activity for kids that is not messy (although that depends on whether the kids want to add glitter to the words that they have coloured in!) It is also a relaxed way to reinforce some spelling while encouraging the kids to get a bit creative with their own lettering.  And for younger kids like my son, who are not that keen to write, it actually ended up being a great way to just get him practicing some letters.

Sunshine sunshine!

Collage Activities with a Mixed-Age Group

This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 6 and 9. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on their different learning activities including lots of hands-on maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.

You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.

 

Guest Post - Taking Inspiration from our Colouring Quotes
Thursday, 15th March 2018

Become a Member to access 39,201 printables!