Camp Crafts for Kids to Make

I love throwback crafts during the summer, and making camp crafts at home or as part of a camping unit/summer camp at school is a great way to get kids engaged in some classic crafting.

The first thing I think of when I think of camp crafting is lanyards, and while I think of lanyards as being the full necklace style you wear around your neck, kids will probably get tired of weaving before then so you can make shorter lanyards for keychains like these from Oh Yay Studio. You can use plastic lacing, paracord or even yarn to make these.

There are tons of variations on paracord bracelets and keychains that are fun for kids to make. This keychain from Artsy Fartsy Mama is easy to make and fun for kids to use as backpack charms during the school year.

Friendship bracelets are another classic to make at camp or over the summer. The easiest ones are just braids, like these from The Soccer Mom Blog. The original pattern includes an essential oil diffuser button bead, but you can leave the oils out and just have a cute braided bracelet if you’d rather.

Or you can use yarn to make classic bracelets with this tutorial from Simplify Create Inspire. This one uses a cardboard circle to help keep your strands separate until you need to knot them.

While we’re on the subject of yarn, you can’t forget the God’s eye (which is the only craft I really remember making the time I went to camp). There are a bunch of tutorials for these, and once you start making one you’ll probably remember how to do it without any assistance. I like this one from Make and Takes, which includes fun beaded accents, too.

Bring a little nature into your summer crafts by decorating walking sticks for you next nature walk. You can paint them, like these from Crafts by Courtney, or wrap them in yarn like Babble Dabble Do did. Or find a Y-shaped stick to make a shaker like this one from Minie Co., or use them for weaving, which I shared at Our Daily Craft.

Do you have a favorite camp craft for kids? I’d love to hear about it!

A classic manipulative in the preschool and early elementary classroom is the snap cube, also known as math cubes, unifix cubes or unit cubes. These little one inch cubes often come in a set of 100 in 10 different colors, and they snap together so they’re easy to use for all sorts of math learning, measuring and more.

No Time for Flashcards has a cute robot printable to use with cubes to measure the height of each robot. That one is free but they also have other printable cube mats that are a paid resource.

Catherine & Co uses math cubes to teach kids about measuring volume. They make a letter from cubes and then measure the volume (there’s a printable worksheet in the post).

Pattern recognition is another fun and easy activity you can do with the cubes. You can use printables like these from Planning Playtime, or just make a pattern from cubes and have kids repeat it or figure out what comes next. There’s another good set of pattern printables at English Created Resources.

Because there are 10 sets of 10 cubes in a pack, these are great for teaching one to one correspondence, counting, sorting and basic addition and subtraction. English Created Resources has great printable number mats you can use to form the number from cubes and count out the number of cubes that corresponds to that number.

ParenTutor has a great collection of snap cube activity ideas, most of which are just pictures, but it’s work taking a look through the post for ideas for using them at home or in the classroom.

To give just a few of their examples, you can match linked blocks to the corresponding number of pieces, use blocks to find different ways to add up to 10, compare numbers and determine which one is more or less, skip counting and weighing different numbers of blocks.

You can also use unit cubes to learn letters, like with these super cute alphabet mats from Fun Learning for Kids. Kids can trace the letter, make it out of cubes and practice writing a word that starts with that letter.

Of course you can also use them to build things, since they are blocks, and there are tons of pattern mats on Teachers Pay Teachers. I also love these dinosaur themed mats from Lets Go to Learn on Etsy.

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