Summer has arrived and we’ve been trying out some ‘self serve’ craft activities for kids.

By ‘self serve’, I mean ones where you can provide the materials on the table and the children can help themselves and create their craft independently (with us there to support when needed) Not only are these types of crafts great for developing children’s imaginations, creativity and independence but they are wonderful for grown ups too as children are happy and occupied.

The self serve activity we chose for the children was to make pretend lollipops!

Really easy, quick and simple and helps develop children’s fine motor skills (find out what fine motor skills are here)

What do you need?

• Card
• Lollipop sticks
• Tape
• Collage material- we used buttons, googly eyes and pieces of ripped up paper, but you could use sequins, glitter, ribbon..anything! (please be mindful of the age and ability of the child, for example don’t choose buttons etc if the child puts things in their mouth)
• Blu Stick– If you’ve not come across Blu Sticks by Bostik yet, they are worth a try! They work like a glue stick but with the added bonus that the glue starts off being blue so children can actually see where they have glued (Genius!) – reducing wastage and sticky messes! The glue sets transparent too.

How do you make them?

To prepare, I cut out the lollipop shapes out of card and set up the collage materials in bowls for the kids to access themselves. More able children could cut out the lollipop shapes themselves or with supervision*.

The children then:

• Attached their lollipop stick to the back of the lollipop cardboard cut out using tape.

• They then used their Blu Stick to cover the front of the lollipop in glue.

• Decorated their lollipops with buttons, paper and googly eyes.

• Left to dry!

Find the Blu Sticks on Amazon here

*Please, as always, be aware that the responsibility to risk assess with any activity lies with you and we take no responsibility for this activity. Please note we were sent samples of Blu Stick and some craft materials for the purpose of this post. All words and pictures are our own. This post contains amazon affiliate links, for more information about this read our About Me section of our blog from the menu.