Printables- some ideas

Printables are a god-send for busy parents trying to keep young children occupied, especially while trying to cook dinner.

A few weeks ago, in this post, I listed some of my favourite sites for printing off pictures and activities to keep your little ones happy. I promised a follow up post with some ideas for activities using your printables and this is it =o)

First of all, you can laminate the pictures and use them as a wipe clean board. You can even bind them into a book as I've done here. Crayons or whiteboard markers work well. Most of the pages are double sided but I left some blank for free drawing

This picture is from daycare but I had planned on doing this with the sheep and duck outlines from the printables I linked to before. Balls of tissue paper glued into the outline. 

 Cut out the shapes, attach a popstick and make puppets. Bella made farm animals and then drew a farmer (and stuck him onto a piece of fettucine, haha, because the popsticks were too short) and performed Old MacDonald had a Farm for us while the Mister and I cooked dinner.

Some other ideas (that I don't have pictures for) 

• Cut out a silhouette of the shape then cut out small parts (ie cat eyes or patterns on a butterfly wing) and glue coloured cellophane over the holes, stick the picture onto the windown and let the light stream through!
• Cut out the shapes and hide them around the garden/house. Pretend to be a shepherd trying to find your herd of 10 sheep! 
• Colour in, laminate and turn into a placemat
• colour in and cut out, attach some string to the back (stickytape or staple) and then hang from a stick or coat hanger as a mobile
• Use as gift tags, laminate and use as bag tags, use to label carious things around the home. 

Let me know if you come up with any other ideas! 

Laura xx