My darling husband when he gets home from work has a tendency to empty the contents of his  pockets somewhere, such as the kitchen bench. I normally pop the various screws, connectors and electrical tape into a container for him to grab when he’s heading to work in the morning. However he doesn’t always remember to take all this with him. As consequence we have quite a few bibs and bobs hanging around, plus rolls and rolls of electrical tape! Seeing as we had so much electrical tape at home I thought we’d make use of it!

I love encouraging my kids to express their creativity and use their imaginations with art activities, but I must admit that activities that make little to no mess, and have almost no prep or clean-up are particularly appealing to me! Especially for an after school activity when dinner preparation is happening.

Electrical tape is great kid’s art material as it comes in a variety of bright colours. It is less adhesive than other tapes, making it easier for children to work with and manipulate without it grabbing onto every nearby surface. Best of all you can normally pick up packs of it very cheaply from dollar bargain type stores. I set my kids up with paper, rolls of tape, scissors and let their creativity free range whilst I was busy with the twins and my husband was making dinner (yes he cooks! I’m very lucky).

Besides good fun and free expression, the benefits of this activity can be:

My children had great fun making simple collages with the tape, but there are lots of possible extensions for this activity. Make learning play by getting them to create their letters and numbers with tape. They could practice their sight words from school by making them out of tape. Make shapes out of tape; squares, rectangles, triangles, hexagons and octagons!

What is an easy art activity that you like to do?