Stencil Christmas Cards
This is another inclusive and accessible creative play activity blog.
If those you care for are very young or have limited intellectual ability, you may feel like so many of the parenting blogs out there just aren’t written for you and your situation.
You need something simpler - much simpler - to get started.
This creative play idea is for you!
This activity reinforces basic education; it helps support speech and language (if that is something your child is able to reach for), learning about shapes, gentle sensory feedback through tactile and auditory senses (the sound of the cotton buds and sponges dabbing the paint onto the paper is very satisfying!) as well as of course visual.
Suggested age/ability level: This activity is accessible for almost everybody. The creation of the stencils can be done by an adult (or older/more able child) ahead of time if the artist is very young or physically / learning disabled.
If the artist is likely to put tools in their mouth, I would recommend using hand-over-hand technique for applying the colour to the stencils.
Estimated Preparation time: It took me about 25 minutes to create the 3 stencils for this creative play session, the word 'Joy' took me the longest time by far, if you have less time, keep it really simple with the shapes.
What you need:
Paper/card
Colouring pencils/pens/paints/glue and glitter
Scissors
Cotton buds and/or sponges
Masking tape
Blue tack (optional, you can just use little pieces of tape and roll it over to make a loop, but blue tack is a lot easier!)
How to Play:
You can use either plain white or black or coloured paper for this activity - whatever you have. You'll need paper to apply the design onto and paper to create the stencil. So for these designs here in the blog I used 5 large sheets of paper.
Gather your colours. If you're using paints, make sure they're loose enough to be dabbed with a cotton bud or small sponge; I used watercolours from a tube and added a few drops of water to each colour. To make pastel shades use mostly white a dot or two of your chosen colour.
Decide if you're wanting to create pieces of artwork or to apply designs to cards. For cards you'll need fairly sturdy paper or card so that it stands up. Fold the paper/card in half to create your cards so you know what size stencil will fill the page.
Draw a shape to cut out. (This is a Christmas-themed blog but you can imagine how you could adapt the designs to suit various seasons, celebrations or events.)
Cut out the shape.
You can create 2 artworks from this one stencil. One you'll be blue-tacking to a page and adding colour around the outside and one you'll be filling the hole.
If you'd like to create a symmetrical image, you can fold over a sheet of paper and draw half a design into the folded edge and cut that out, like I've done with this snowman shape here.
To create a word stencil, choose a word and write it in cursive so it's one continuous line then cut along the line and along it again taking away a little more of the paper edge you've just cut to leave a thicker cut-out line.
You can see from the photo above that I've used many little dots of blue tack to stick the word down to the paper.
Now it's time to add colour! Both my boys enjoyed using the cotton buds to apply dots of paint into the stencil shapes; they are a great choice for little hands as they're so lightweight and great for sensory avoidant children/adults as they keep the skin a little way away from the paint. If you use the sponges you're more likely to get painty.
For adding colour to the outside of the stencil I found it easier to use a sponge but you can absolutely use the cotton buds again if you prefer.
And, if you don't want to use paints at all a lovely option is to use pens or pencils and scribble inside the cut out shape, and maybe use pastels to smudge around the outside.
If you don't have black paper you can create a dark background for your snowman by dabbing/sponging black and/or dark blue paint/crayon/pastel over the page and letting it dry before layering on your stencil and filling it in. For this design below I used a mixture of white and gold paint.
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY CREATING!
If you're new here to the Sonshine Art blog, here is a very brief overview of our parenting experience for you: Our sons are now 16 and 10 years old. They're both Autistic, they are both learning disabled (but to very different degrees), they've both had complex issues with communication - particularly with their speech, which our eldest still finds incredibly difficult. It took a LONG time to get appropriate speech and language therapy support and the right SEN school placements for our sons so I took upon myself to do a lot of homeschooling when they were little. My sister was a primary school teacher and some of her ideas inspired my own. I adapted them to make sense for the ability levels of our boys. Almost every idea in my blogs here comes from that time of our lives when my husband and I worked every day to support their learning and life skills. (We still do of course, and we still play and learn at home using a lot of these activities as the basis for learning and fun.)
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Take care and happy playing!
Amy (Sonshine Art Mama)