We’re on a long trip visiting my extended family for a month, and for RMB 22.8 I bought my daughter hours of creative crafting fun and myself hours of peace and quiet.

It all started when a crafting supply box got pushed onto my Pinduoduo feed. For those who still don’t know what Pinduoduo is, think of it as an even cheaper version of Taobao. You can get virtually anything on it for a super low price.

Pro Tip: While I’m sure there are plenty of trusty merchants on Pinduoduo, the general consensus is that you should only buy basic stuff on this platform and not foods, skincare, or expensive things, since the quality can sometimes be a bit dogy.

The art boxes come in sets designed for kids in different age groups. They’ve got essentially everything you’d need in them already, and each craft is individually packaged, which makes picking and choosing which one to work on so much easier. You’d still need to have your own markers if you want to color, and your own scissors to cut things, but stuff like double-sided tape, glue, and all the supplies and directions you’d need are in the box.

It’s perfect for when you’re on a long holiday and away from your plethora of arts and crafts supplies at home.

For RMB 22.8 I got a box of 16 different arts and crafts items, all perfect for my almost 3-year-old toddler to entertain herself with.

Each craft comes with instructions (but really, they’re so simple you don’t even need them). From gluing fluffy balls onto a unicorn to decorating a blue whale with glittery stickers, this box of arts and crafts has kept my toddler occupied all by herself for hours while I’ve gotten to enjoy some quiet time close by.

To purchase the kit, download the Pinduoduo app and put the photo of the product into the search function. Or scan the QR code below to buy the exact same product for RMB 35.9 on Taobao.

Images: Mina Yan

I love crafting with my little girl. Even if what we make isn’t as intricate as the store-bought toys, she seems to love them way more. Maybe it’s because Mommy made them, or maybe it’s because she had a hand in creating them (like her bright red police car). Either way, in this house, we love making our own toys.

Our latest DIY addition is a parking garage for all her cars. I’m a newbie when it comes to DIY crafts and this one is perfect since it doesn’t require any precise measurements. It took way less time than I had expected and watching my toddler come up with all sorts of different ways to play with it makes it time well spent.

This craft takes approximately 40 minutes.

Here’s what you’ll need:
One large cardboard box
Small cardboard pieces
Hot glue gun
Exacto knife & ruler
Tape

Step 1: Cut out a big piece of cardboard.

Step 2: Since your big cardboard piece will most likely have folds, cut out a smaller piece and tape it to the back to reinforce your base piece.

Step 3: Take one long piece of cardboard and split it into four smaller pieces. Roll them into pillars and use tape to secure them.

Step 4: Find a smaller box with sides if you can to make the top part of your parking structure. Cut open half of one side to use for the ramp.

Step 5: Use a pencil to mark where you’ll be putting your pillars and secure them to your base with a hot glue gun.

Step 6: Find a long piece of cardboard and connect it to the top part of your parking structure and to the base. This will be your ramp.

Step 7: Use smaller pieces to add sides to your ramp. Trust me, you’ll need these when your kid starts pushing all their cars down at the same time.

Step 8: Smooth out the bottom of your ramp and secure it to your base with tape. This will help the cars from skipping when they get to the bottom.

Step 9: Then add sides around the entire base to keep the cars from falling off. And voilà, you’re done! Add in some parking space and decorate it however you like.

Pro Tip:
Flatten out those nice kuaidi boxes and keep a stack handy. They’re made from such durable cardboard material and are perfect for DIY crafts at home.

Did you enjoy making this with your kids? Search #jingkidsCrafts for more kitchen table crafting ideas.

Images: Mina Yan

I know you just finished your back-to-school shopping, but believe it or not the holidays will be here before you know it. If you are like me you have already started making your to-do list, and right now you can preorder some of the funniest expat-centric cards around and help not one, but two good causes! Let me introduce you to Snowland Art.

In 2010 a Canadian expat named Kristel Ouwehand – aka Tenzin Dolma – established the Tibetan Artists’ Development Company.

It is a five-year art and handcraft training school devoted to maintaining the integrity of the art of Thangka, and students come to the school to live and study the Buddhist art form. According to the website, “The school only takes a small number of students, focusing on quality rather than quantity… Kristel and her students go through all the exam papers, and each student gives his/her view as to which two or three applicants they would choose to accept.”

And the tuition has remained low. Students pay only RMB 500 for the entire 5-year program. All other operating costs are supplemented through donations and the sale of student work via Snowland Art Studios.

And what they produce in the studio are incredible one-of-a-kind, sustainable art pieces that make wonderful gifts. Unique and customizable puzzles, ornaments, pillows, and water bottles are just a few of the items that support a great cause and will be treasured souvenirs for you to gift or use to decorate your own home.

Even with all of this said, perhaps the most impressive thing about the program is its sense of civic responsibility. Most of the students come from humble backgrounds and they work hard to build a better future for themselves. But despite having far fewer resources than most of us are lucky enough to access, they still find ways to support other community programs through their work.

This year their famous and funny expat holiday cards are doing more than just giving us a laugh. A percentage of the sales from the cards will be donated to local animal shelters that have been hit hard over the past few years with relocations and building costs.

To order cards that will make your friends’ holidays a little brighter and help a furry friend find a warm place to sleep during the cold Beijing winters, scan the QR code in the flyer below.

KEEP READING: Don’t Leave Beijing Without These Unique Souvenirs

Images: Snowland Art

Arts and crafts is an enjoyable way for kids to learn about nature and develop their creativity and coordination skills while enhancing their connections with their environment.

Early years art teacher Jacob Dong led his Year 1 class into the world of minibeasts. In line with their current Unit of Investigation on sustainability, Mr. Dong and his class used recycled materials to create their artworks.

Materials:

1. one recycled bottle

2. one long sock

3. four pipe cleaners

4. two buttons

5. some bead

Steps:

First things first: Create your minibeast’s body!

1) Choose your favorite bottle shape.

2) Take a colorful long sock (or cut a long stocking).

3) Make sure one end of the sock is closed; otherwise, tie a knot and turn the sock inside out to hide the knot.

4) Slide the bottle inside the sock.

Second, your minibeast needs antennae and eyes!

1) Tie a pipe cleaner around the bottleneck and twist both ends together.

2) Shape the antennae as you like.

3) Slide one button and some beads onto each end of the pipe cleaners to give your minibeast big eyes.

Finally, minibeasts have six legs, don’t they?

1) For each pair of legs, twist one pipe cleaner around the body, and make sure the legs face the ground, opposite the antennas.

2) Twist the legs into the right shape.

Images: Dulwich College of Beijing

This article appeared in the jingkids 2022 Graduation issue

When the kids call for an arts and crafts activity on the fly, an easy one to whip up is an afternoon spent at home getting creative with salt dough. Salt dough is an exciting activity that can be done all year round. It’s easy, fun, and sparks creativity in kids of all ages.

Swiss School teacher Linda Ninio along with JG1 student Wenxin Li, Grade 1 student Justin Springfeld, and Grade 2 student Jana Pesch show us their salt dough creations in our March/April issue’s Maker’s Corner.

What You’ll Need

• 2 cups of flour
• 1 cup of water
• 1 cup of salt (optional: a little bit of some oil)
• Food coloring
• Rolling pin
• Cookie cutters
• Parchment paper
• Toothpick
• Thread and scissors

Instructions

1. Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl then add the wet ingredients. Knead until the dough is soft and easy to shape.

2. Optional: If you want colored dough, add a few drops of food coloring. For a unicolor dough, knead thoroughly; for marble-like dough, knead just a little.

3. Get creative! The salt dough can be used to knead and cut all possible shapes and figures! Shape with your bare hands, make cut-outs with cookie cutters, use shells to create an imprint, add flowers or create animals.

4. If you want to hang your artwork later, pierce a hole using a straw before baking/drying.

5. The figures are baked at 125°C for about an hour. Before cooling down, check whether the dough has hardened.

Alternatively, the salt dough figures can also be air-dried. This takes about two days, but the figures will crack less. If you are using flowers or other fresh materials to decorate, we recommend air drying.

6. Once the figures are cold and dry, they can be painted with water-based paint or with felt-tip pens (don’t press too hard!).

KEEP READING: We’re Recruiting Students for the Next Teen Takeover Issue!

Images: WAB Communications

This article appeared in the jingkids 2021 March issue

We had a fun time this year hearing from Beijingkids readers about how they have or have not adjusted traditions to celebrate Christmas in Beijing, which you can read in our new December issue. Their stories reminded me of one of my favorite parties we ever hosted: a last-minute Boxing Day party where we invited preschool friends to play in a castle made out of all the boxes from presents received the day before.

Boxing Day is also called Saint Stephens Day, and my father Stephen always made sure we knew that. Some tie the name of the day to alms boxes in the Middle Ages, which were collected in honor of Saint Stephen, whereas others refer back to the “Christmas box” given to servants on the holiday, then left the day after with a box filled with gifts, money, and sometimes leftover food they could bring back to their families.

We’re not very religious in our family, nor do we have servants who need a day off. We just thought it would be fun to use all the boxes from a generous holiday to create a castle and tunnels for our kids and their friends.

The final product from that first Boxing Day party.

So it was that with gift boxes, old moving boxes, duct tape, and our friends, we created a little fantasy world in our own home. There were spots to hide and many crawl spaces where adults could not go, and the kids loved it. It was a small party, given how people were tired from their holiday festivities, yet so much fun. We drew bricks on the castle and created our own plaques and coats of arms to match the swords and shields in our toybox. The castle even lasted a week after Boxing Day, after one too many dragons attacked it and we dismantled it for the recycling bin.

Our castle was quite elaborate, but it doesn’t need to be. Here are some ways to start on the quest towards upcycling gift boxes into a fun fort where kids can play.

You don’t need a whole wall to draw your designs.

1. Plan your design together with the kids

Will it have a drawbridge? Turrets? Windows? Multiple rooms or one large throne room (much easier to accomplish with the wee ones)? Draw it out! What is the story behind your castle? Who lives there? All great questions to ask that will inform your design.

What visuals make a castle a castle?

2. Decide which elements of a castle mean the most to your little knights

Ramparts are the easiest way to identify a castle versus just a big building. And they’re very easy to cut, even with small hands! So if you’ve taped your castle walls firmly and don’t know why it’s missing that certain look to define it, I’d suggest you look to the tops of the boxes and start cutting.

It might be a good day to graduate an older child from those safety scissors to real ones.

3. Use strong tape and scissors

It could also serve as a good time for a refresher on safety using scissors. You may need to have an exacto knife handy for the windows and such, but there is no reason kids of all ages can’t work on the cooler parts, like cutting a triangle for a turret or banners to hang from its walls.

Be inspired by the best of Beijing’s history.

4. Make it your own kind of castle 

With so much history and beautiful architecture and design in our own Beijing, why not take the opportunity to add more history to your upcycling project? What a very cool way to learn all about your neighborhood. It could even turn into a day outing for the family to make sketches and re-design your upcycled kingdom.

Do you have a special post-holiday tradition? Let us know in the comments!

KEEP READING: Last-Minute Christmas Gifts from Local Creators and Brands

Photos: Cindy Marie Jenkins, Unsplash

Seeing as today starts Halloween weekend, what could be better than having a creative day before all the trick-a-treating, and let the kids make fun Halloween DIY crafts? We take a look back on what now 8-year-old Robbie from House of Knowledge made for the 2019 October issue of beijingkids’ Maker’s Corner section. 

When it comes to Halloween, there is no spooky theme or format off-limits to decorate your house. Every year, no matter how tastefully terrifying or terrifyingly tacky your handicraft, spending time with your little ones to make decorations provides a great opportunity for family fun!

For this month’s Maker’s Corner, Robbie, a 7-year-old student from House of Knowledge, along with his teacher Marianna Wilde, made a happy Halloween grave bat flying in the moon. Robbie drew a lot of stars for the sky, including a make-a-wish shooting star. With his bat’s big smile, we believe he will greet trick-or-treaters in a cute way this Halloween.

The instructions below are only guidelines. Feel free to encourage your kids to use their creativity to decorate their bat craft however they like.

What You’ll Need

• Paint
• Stapler
• Scissors
• Double-sided tape/glue
• 1 black thick paper card
• 2 paper plates
• 2 colored craft sticks
• 2-3 paintbrushes
• Printable bat and graveyard craft templates

Instructions

Print and cut out the bat and graveyard craft templates. Paint the back of one of the paper plates black.

(Graveyard) Use the double-sided tape to place the graveyard template on the inner circle of the black plate and draw around the graveyard. Cut out the middle of the plate following the drawn lines.

(Sky) Paint the front of another paper plate blue. When it’s dried, add stars to your blue night sky.

(Bat) Place the bat template on the black thick card, draw around it, and cut out the paper following the drawn lines. Add eyes and a smile or teeth to your bat. You will need to put together two-colored craft sticks and stick the bat onto one end.

(Moon) Draw a moon on the scrap plate and cut it out. Then you can glue it onto the rim of the black plate.

Lay the graveyard plate on top of the blue sky plate and place the bat with the glued sticks in between, then staple all around the two paper plates. Don’t forget to leave a section at the bottom open so you can move the bat puppet from side to side.

This article appeared in the beijingkids October 2019 Best Friends Fur-ever issue

KEEP READING: Say Boo! Brush Up on Your Halloween Vocabulary 

Photos: Uni You

There’s a reason why people buy flowers to brighten up a room, cheer up a friend, and appreciate a loved one. Depending on the flower, they can symbolize complex human emotions just from their sheer beauty. As famed artist, Georgia O’Keefe once said, “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for a moment.”

Nine-year-old Madeleine and eight-year-old Ninon create a Georgia O’Keefe-inspired photo frame with Atelier Art School teacher, James Sserwadda.

What You’ll Need

• Stapler
• Plastic clay
• Acrylic paint
• Yarn and cardboard
• Some color papers
• 2-3 medium paint brushes
• Disposable plastic plates (10 and 15cm diameter)
• Double-sided tape, glue stick, and masking tape
• Pair of scissors and box cutters (cutters only used with the help of parents)

How to make it

1. Using a box cutter, cut out the inner circle of the big (15cm) plate leaving about 3 cm of space from the plate’s ridges. Take the smaller plate (10cm) and use the double-sided tape to connect the two plates by the edges.

2. Use the stapler to strengthen the taped side of the plates.

3.  After stapling the plates, take out a separate piece of paper and draw the shapes of flower petals from a rose, oriental poppies, and lily flowers. Cut out the shapes with a pair of scissors and use a stencil to draw other shapes on any color paper of your choice.

Note

· These can be 2-3 colors.

· The petal shapes can be of different shapes and of different color.

· The petal shapes of the 15cm plastic plate should be bigger than the 10cm plastic plate.

4. Using a glue stick, glue the smaller petals on the small plate first by gluing them side-by-side on the edge. Continue the same process on the 15cm plastic plate; use a mix of colors and place in varying positions.

5. Start to create decorative details of the flower with plastic clay. First roll out some plastic clay from a preferred color and line it along the cut-out line of the circle on the 15cm plate. Continue to create more details to represent a flower.

6. Using the brushes, apply acrylic paint around the decorative areas to cover the white area of the plastic plate.

7. Draw a 12-13cm diameter circle on a piece of cardboard, cut it out and tape your photo on one side of the cut-out cardboard. Use masking tape to tape it on the back of the 15cm plastic plate so that the photo is showing through the cut-out section.

8. Draw leaf shapes on color paper and cut them out to further decorate your flowers. Use double-sided tape to glue them on the back of the 15cm plate.

9. Finally, pick the yarn and tie a note and use masking tape to attach it on to the 15cm plate so you can place it anywhere that will brighten up mom’s day!

KEEP READING: Beijing Creative Institution Atelier Art School Closes Its Doors

Photos: Uni You

This article appeared in the beijingkids 2020 May issue

When it comes to Halloween, there is no spooky theme or format off-limits to decorate your house. Every year, no matter how tastefully terrifying or terrifyingly tacky your handicraft, spending time with your little ones to make decorations provides a great opportunity for family fun!

For this month’s Maker’s Corner, Robbie, a 7-year-old student from House of Knowledge, along with his teacher Marianna Wilde, made a happy Halloween grave bat flying in the moon. Robbie drew a lot of stars for the sky, including a make-a-wish shooting star. With his bat’s big smile, we believe he will greet trick-or-treaters in a cute way this Halloween.

The instructions below are only guidelines. Feel free to encourage your kids to use their creativity to decorate their bat craft however they like.

What You’ll Need

• Paint
• Stapler
• Scissors
• Double-sided tape/glue
• 1 black thick paper card
• 2 paper plates
• 2 colored craft sticks
• 2-3 paint brushes
• Printable bat and graveyard craft templates

Instructions

Print and cut out the bat and graveyard craft templates. Paint the back of one of the paper plates black.

(Graveyard) Use the double-sided tape to place the graveyard template on the inner circle of the black plate and draw around the graveyard. Cut out the middle of the plate following the drawn lines.

(Sky) Paint the front of another paper plate blue. When it’s dried, add stars to your blue night sky.

(Bat) Place the bat template on the black thick card, draw around it, and cut out the paper following the drawn lines. Add eyes and a smile or teeth to your bat. You will need to put together two colored craft sticks and stick the bat onto one end.

(Moon) Draw a moon on the scrap plate and cut it out. Then you can glue it onto the rim of the black plate.

Lay the graveyard plate on top of the blue sky plate and place the bat with the glued sticks in between, then staple all around the two paper plates. Don’t forget to leave a section at the bottom open so you can move the bat puppet from side to side.

This article appeared in the beijingkids October 2019 Best Friends Fur-ever issue