Building Your Creativity Toolbox

When it comes to creating, we at Children’s Creativity Museum love to take inspiration from the materials we find around the museum. We love using up-cycled materials, common household items, and donated materials to create fun workshops that are easy for anyone to do at home and are less harmful for the environment. Alongside those materials, we also make sure to have a few key items in our “Creativity Toolbox”at all times.

If you’d like to make your very own Creativity Toolbox, here are our Top Recommended Items in when doing activities at home! Hop on our Amazon list and order yours today!

1. The staple items: Construction Paper, Washable Markers, Oil Pastels, and Scissors. Construction paper is the base for so many of our projects as it can be cut with scissors, folded, colored, painted on, collaged and so much more. Add in washable markers for drawing and coloring or oil pastels for color mixing and a pack of construction paper can lead to hours of engaging activities.

2. Binding Materials: Liquid Glue can be used to make mod-podge, slime, and texturize paintings while glue sticks are a quick way to glue anything today without as much of a mess. Masking tape is wonderful for quick bindings and a great way stick things together that can’t be glued. Bonus item: Monkey String! Monkey string is wonderful for tying together items and has a really fun waxy texture that retains its shape.

3)  Painting + Brushing. Liquid watercolor is a great material to have in your toolkit because it is very versatile. It can be used not only to paint with your paint brushes but to add color to science experiments, in spray bottles to add a mist of watercolor, or added when making slime, colorful glue, or play-dough.

4) Colorful Textures. We always like to have at least one of these on hand when working with up-cycled materials. Tissue paper can be used to paper mache and can be illuminated when put in front of light. Pipe cleaners can be used to create fun critters while string and yarn can be used to create fun wearable art. Pom Poms can be used to decorate anything that needs a little pizazz!

5) Light + Electricity. Coin cell batteries are always a favorite of ours. Combining batteries with LED Lights are one the most fun ways to practice engineering and light up anything you make! Bonus step you want to make paper circuits with copper tape!
6) The Science Staples. Baking Soda, Vinegar, Yeast, and Hydrogen Peroxide. As long as you have these items in the cabinet, you have what you need for some fun science. You may want to add some goggles and a tablecloth though, combining some of these items can get very messy!

7) Don’t forget that many things you have around the house are perfect for creating. Toilet paper rolls, coffee filters and stirrers, paper plates, and paper cups all make for wonderful objects for innovating!

Head over to our Amazon list to purchase these things today and drop a comment below letting us know what you keep in your Creativity Toolbox when you practice #CreativityEveryday!