How to Make a School Supply Box Craft Idea for Kids

How to Make a School Supply Box Craft Idea for Kids

Get your kids excited about going back to school with this cute and functional organizer. From crayons to calculators, this sturdy box will keep supplies handy for your busy youngsters. This is an affordable craft so it can be totally customized each year according to their current interests and ever-changing style.

Crafts Materials Needed:

Shoe Box

3 to 5 Colors of Construction Paper

Scissors

Clear Tape

School Theme Stickers

Colored Markers

Paint (optional)

Plastic Peanut Butter Lid

Frozen Juice Can

Instant Pudding Box

Glue

Decorations

Cover the bottom of the shoe box with construction paper, using tape to secure the edges and corners. Decorate the sides with school theme stickers and use colored markers to personalize the overall look. Next, cover the shoe box lid in a different color of construction paper, securing all edges and corners with tape.

The peanut butter lid, juice can, and pudding box will be the trays on top for organizing supplies. Prepare the trays by cleaning them thoroughly and making sure they are dry. Most peanut butter lids are already a nice primary color so you can choose to leave it as is. For the other two, remove the tops from the containers. Either paint them or cover them with a different color of construction paper.

Attach the trays to the top of the shoe box with glue, paying careful attention to how the weight will be distributed once they are holding supplies. In other words, don’t line them all up along one edge or your box will fall over when used.

After the trays have completely dried, use more school theme stickers, treasures from summer vacation, and colored markers to complete the decorations. This is a good time to allow your child to add a little funkiness to his or her box. Glue on pom-poms, glitter, googly eyes, tiny creatures, or happy meal toys. Keep in mind that your child will be using this box every day at homework time so it needs to be something that is fun to look at and is all about them.

When everything is in place, the decorations have been completed, and it is completely dry, fill the box with school supplies. Place the lid on top and organize the most used items in the trays. They can hold almost anything your child will need.

One great thing I have discovered since my child started preschool with his own school supply box is the portability. If he wants his Nana to help him with his homework one night, he really enjoys packing up his supplies and holding his box on his lap in the car. There is a sense of pride that comes with having your own little box of supplies and he looks forward to homework every day. Crafting with your child is a time to bond and I hope your kids will enjoy this project the whole school year. Be sure to pass this idea along to moms who home school as they have an even greater challenge in keeping supplies from taking over their entire house.

Jacilyn Wheeler—Christian, Mom, Virtual Assistant

Visit www.MoxieSupport.com to learn how you can reduce stress and work smarter, not harder!

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Technorati Tags: back to school crafts, school crafts, back to school, back to school activities, school activities, school supply crafts, school supplies crafts, organization crafts, school organization crafts, paper organization crafts, paper organization, school organization, organize schoolwork, organize homework, organization for kids, how to organize

How to Make a School Book Cover Out of a Decorated Gift Bag

How to Make a School Book Cover Out of a Decorated Gift Bag

As my kids get older and older, there seems to be more and more books that we need to cover. I have become a pro at turning brown grocery store bags into neat little school book covers. Yesteray, I covered my son’s Math book cover into a homemade comic book cover.  Today, I decided to cover my daughter’s book with book cover made from a decorated gift bag. I will detail how I turned a gift bag into a homemade school textbook cover in the tutorial / article below.

(1) First, get out a gift bag that you don’t need anymore. I used a gift bag that my daughter received a birthday present in.

(2) You will now need to cut out either the right or left side of the gift bag and also the bottom of the gift bag. Look at the blue lines above. (Please note that in the picture above, I had already cut the side of the bag open.)

(3) After you cut out the side and bottom of the bag, it should lay out easily, like you see above.

(4) Now lay the book in the center of the gift bag…or if the bag is big enough, place the book where you think the decoration will meet the front of the book. Trace the bottom and top of the book onto the gift bag’s surface.

(5) Now fold the top of the bag down and the bottom of the bag up so that they meet the 2 lines that you drew in step 5.

(6) Now place the book back onto the gift bag (on top of the newly created flaps).

(7) Open up your book so that you can fold the gift bag over your book’s cover.

(8) Next, fold your gift bag’s flaps over your book book’s cover. The book cover should slide into the book’s flaps that you just created.

(9) This is what it should look like (above) when the one side of the book’s covers is slid into the brown paper bag flaps. You should take some scotch tape to tape the flaps onto the front of the gift bag. A few pieces should do the trick.

The other side of the book’s cover is harder to fit into the gift  bag flaps, so you will probably have to slide the bag over the book cover.

(11) If all works out well, your book cover should look like this. If you had problems, you might need to use more tape. This is fine too. Ask your parents for help if you just can’t do it. Don’t feel bad, it is a bit tough the first few times you try to do your own book cover (for parents who are out of practice too).

Good Luck.  Also visit yesterday’s post Homemade Comic Book Cover From a Grocery Store Bag

Here are even more school book cover making and decorating crafts.

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How to Paint Your School BookBag

How to Use Sharpies to Decorate Your School BookBag

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Decorate Your Binders and Notebooks Crafts

Decorate Your School Lockers

Make or Decorate Bulletin Boards / Tack Boards / Cork Boards

School Work Organization and Homework Organizers Crafts

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Technorati Tags: back to school crafts, school crafts, back to school, back to school activities, school activities, book cover crafts, book covers, how to make a book cover, how to book covers, decorate book covers, fun book covers, making book covers, designing book covers, comic book covers, gift bag book covers, book covers with gift bags, school book covers

How to Make a Comics Covered School Book Cover with a Brown Grocery Bag

How to Make School Book Covers Out of a Brown Grocery Store Bag – Make it Fun with Comics Strips and Contact Paper

As my kids get older and older, there seems to be more and more books that we need to cover. I have become a pro at turning brown grocery store bags into neat little school book covers. I decided to turn my son’s Math book cover into a fun comic book cover. I still remember my Charlie Brown metal lunch box from when I was a kid and I read the comic strips on that lunch box a zillion times when I was bored at school. Although I don’t want my son to read the comic strips on his book during Math class, I figure that there will be times at school when he is bored and will enjoy looking at these comic strips. I covered the book cover with contact paper to protect the comics. I also put a word search on there, which can be done over and over again since the contact paper can be used as a wipe-able surface for washable markers. I hope you enjoy this comic strip grocery store bag school book cover project (wow – that would be hard to say in one breath).

(1) First, get out a store brown grocery bag.

(2) Next, cut out the right side of the bag (the creases form a rectangle) … cut this side out.

(3) Now cut out the bottom of the bag too.

(4) After you have cut out the bottom and right side of the bag, you will have a rectangle shape. Lay this out as flat as you are able to.

(5) Put your school textbook in the center of the brown bag.  Trace the bottom and top of the book onto the brown grocery store bag.

(6) Now fold the top of the bag down and the bottom of the bag up so that they meet the 2 lines that you drew in step 5.

(7) Now place the book back onto the brown bag (on top of the newly created flaps).

(8) Next, fold your brown paper bag flaps over your book book’s cover. The book cover should slide into the book’s flaps that you just created.

(9) This is what it should look like (above) when the one side of the book’s covers is slid into the brown paper bag flaps.

(10) The other side of the book’s cover is harder to fit into the brown paper bag flaps, so you will probably have to slide the bag over the book cover (like shown above).

(11) If all works out well, your book cover should look like this. If you had problems, you might need to use tape. This is fine too. Ask your parents for help if you just can’t do it. Don’t feel bad, it is a bit tough the first few times you try to do your own book cover (for parents who are out of practice too).

(12) If you want to make things a bit fun for your kids, then take out their comic magazines and paste them onto the brown paper book cover.

(13) It is also a lot of fun to paste on puzzles and quizzes to give them activities to do when they are bored or done with work at school.

(14) Anything with fun illustrations or cartoons can be pasted onto the inside flap covers too. No need to waste good brown paper bag space.

(15) Don’t forget about the back of your child’s book too. After I pasted on all of the cartoons, comics, puzzles, trivia quizzes, etc, I took out a sheet of contact paper and covered the entire book. Now the book cover is protected and my son can do the puzzles over and over again. Good luck.

Here are even more school book cover making and decorating crafts.

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How to Paint Your School BookBag

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School Book Bags Crafts

Decorate Your Binders and Notebooks Crafts

Decorate Your School Lockers

Make or Decorate Bulletin Boards / Tack Boards / Cork Boards

School Work Organization and Homework Organizers Crafts

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Technorati Tags: back to school crafts, school crafts, back to school, back to school activities, school activities, book cover crafts, book covers, how to make a book cover, how to book covers, decorate book covers, fun book covers, making book covers, designing book covers, comic book covers, grocery bag book covers, brown bag book covers, school book covers

Homework Organizer Crafts Project for Parents and Kids to Declutter Paperwork

How to Make a Homework Organizer to De-Clutter School Paperwork

My kids had their first day of school today. I spent the entire day cleaning and organizing the house because after an entire Summer of kids being at home, the entire house was a cluttered mess. After I finished de-cluttering my kitchen, I realized that as soon as the kids get home, my kitchen is going to get cluttered again within a week. Why? Because with school comes tons of school papers … homework, tests, crafts, artwork, notifications, and so much more … and all of these papers will pour into my house. I never know what to do with all of quickly growing stack of homework and school papers. I am afraid to throw things away for fear that either my children or me will need that paper soon. So I decided that I would create a school papers organizer. This school paperwork organization system is the craft that I will share with you today.

Crafts Materials Needed:

Cereal Boxes and other boxes in various sizes

Scissors

Glue or Glue Stick

Tape

Contact Paper

Wrapping Paper  or Construction Paper or Tissue Paper or Decorative Papers

Sharpie Markers (or other Permanent Markers)

Wipeable Markers

Step 1 – Planning Stage

The first step is to plan out how the boxes that you have will fit together to hold school papers and possibly folders and what ever other items that you will want to store in this schoolwork organization box. Cereal Boxes seem to be the perfecgt size to hold paper, but all cereal boxes come in many different shapes and sizes, so please make sure that looseleaf paper will fit in your cereal boxes too.

When you know where you want the boxes to lay, then loosely keep them in place by making tape loops (as seen above). This will hold the boxes in place long enough to tape the boxes in place more securely later.

Step 2 – Tape Boxes Together Securely

Now, first of all, painting tape wouldn’t have been my first choice, but my kids are always stealing my tapes, so this blue tape is what I was stuck with. After you have loosely secured the boxes together with tape loops, then you can take tape and tape everything together more securely. You can see above that I didn’t go overboard, I just taped where tape was needed.

Step 3 – Cover / Wrap Your Boxes with Colored Paper

Now it is time to cover your boxes with colorful paper. I have four kids, and I decided to use a different color for each child. I also tried to keep in mind what colors my boys would reject as being too girly. Attach the paper with glue or glue stick.

Step 4 – Cover with Contact Paper

Now you can start covering the homework organization box with contact paper. The reason we are doing this is so that you can leave notes to each of your children…or they can leave notes to you. I also like covering the box with contact paper because it laminates and protects the surface of the box from spilled drinks and other liquids. Since this will be in my kitchen, I wanted to make sure that the surface was protected.

Step 5 – Label with Permanent Markers

Now you can use Permanent Marker, such as a Sharpie marker, to label the boxes. I put each of my children’s names on each of the boxes in big bubble letters to show each of them which box is theirs. Below my children’s names are notes to my children (or notes from my children to me) that is drawn on with a wipeable marker. Every day we can wipe off the wipeable marker to leave new messages to eachother. I wrote out on the middle box to show where they should pick up notes and papers that need to go back to school. You can set up this however you feel would work best for your family.

An extra that I decided to add to this project was to pick up 2 wipeable boards, which I picked up from the dollar store. Oone  is an empty wipeable task list and one is an empty wipeable calendar. I used hot glue to glue each of these to the side of the box. But really I could have just drawn the calendar and task list on the contact paper.

Good Luck. You might also like the last 2 blog posts that we did – How to Paint Your School BookBag … How to Use Sharpies to Decorate Your School BookBag

Here are More School Book Bags Crafts

Here are More School Book Bags Crafts

Decorate Your Binders and Notebooks Crafts

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School Work Organization and Homework Organizers Crafts

How to Make and Decorate School Book Covers Crafts

Technorati Tags: organization crafts, school organization crafts, paper organization crafts, paper organization, school organization, organize schoolwork, organize homework, organization for kids, how to organize, back to school crafts, back to school, back to school activities

How to Personalize Your School Bags : Draw on and Paint Your BackPacks

How to Personalize Your School Bags : Draw on and Paint Your BackPacks

Last week I wrote about my daughter’s backpack and how I personalized her backpack by drawing on it with Sharpie markers.  Sarah loves the way I customized her new school book bag and is very excited to start school tomorrow to show off her new backpack. My oldest son, Ben, also wanted me to customize his new school backpack. The one thing that I didn’t like about the way Sarah’s backpack turned out is that the marker’s colors didn’t show up on the background color of her book bag very well because the bag was too dark. Ben’s book bag is black so I knew that I had to either paint one part of his bag white (so I could paint or draw on it) or paint on canvas and glue / sew the canvas on to the bag. I decided to do the latter. I had some extra canvas in my basement and I decided to put it to good use.

My son Ben LOVES Legos. The kid does nothing but build with Legos.  So a few weeks ago I started painting a Lego City mural in his room. It is huge so I haven’t gotten very far on it yet, but I decided to draw a Lego Superheroes backpack to go with his new wall. I copied above an image of his partly done mural (it is going to be on 3 of his walls so I need to get busy).

You don’t have to be a an artist to paint and or draw on your backpack, but if you or your child loves to draw, then this book bag painting craft will be even more fun for you or your child. Nobody else will have the same exact knapsack as you…it will be a great keepsake to keep for years to come. It would also be neat to make a different personalized backpack every year so that you can put all of your special projects from that year in your personalized book bag from that year. This is how I went about making Ben’s backpack.

Step 1 – Planning Stage

Since I knew that my son wanted a Lego Superhero painting on his backpack, I knew that I had to see if these Lego Minifigs even existed. So I did a search on Google Images for ‘Lego Superheroes’ and found many great images to draw for my son’s personalized backpack.

Crafts Materials Needed:

Book Bag / Back Pack

Canvas (if your backpack is too dark to draw on)

Pencil

Eraser

Sharpie Markers (or Permanent Markers)

Acrylic Paints or Fabric Paints

Hot Glue or Needle and Thread

Step 2 – Pencil and Then Pen Draw Your Sketch onto Your Canvas or Book Bag

Get your book bag or canvas out and draw your sketch onto the bag in PENCIL FIRST.  I was able to draw these from looking at the pictures that I found, but if you are having problems…then you can get a really cheap projector off of eBay or from a toy store.  With a projector, you can trace images very easily and this allows anyone to be able to make excellent drawings.

When you are sure that you like the way your design looks, then you can use a black sharpie to draw out the lines permanently. The thicker and darker the lines are drawn, the sharper the design will look. Take a look at Marvel Comics to see what I mean.

Step 3 – Color in Your Designs on Your School BackPack

Now that your sketch drawing has been outlined in a permanent marker, you can start painting with acrylics or fabric paints. Don’t paint to thick and try to smooth out all of your painted lines. After you have painted everything in, I suggest that you re-outline everything with black paint with a nice thick black line. This will make your illustrations “POP’ out at you. You can also put the highlights in the painting like I did with a few white highlights (just lines or slight smudges).

When you are finished, set your painting aside and let it sit out to dry (somewhere out of reach of animals and young children.) If you painted directly on the surface of your backpack, then you are finished. Once it dries, you can wear your backpack. If you painted on canvas, then we are going to need to attach that to your backpack.

Step 4 – Attach Your Painted Canvas On To Your Book Bag’s Surface

Once your painting has dried we can attach it to your book bag’s surface. All book bags are different so you will need to decide where to attach it. However, on my son’s backpack, there was a large front zipper compartment that the painting fit on almost perfectly. You can either use hot glue or needle and thread to attach the canvas to your bag’s surface … or you can do both to make sure that the painting stays put. I decided to just use hot glue. I tucked in the edges of the canvas as I was gluing it to the bag’s surface. This was a little tough to do around the curved edges, but I took my time and it looks like I painted directly on the surface of the bag…and that is a good thing. Make sure (if you are using glue) to glue all of the canvas to the bag, not just the edges. If you are sewing, make sure to find a thread that closely matches your child’s painting / bag.

Good Luck! Also check out my Daughter’s Customized Backpack – Decorated by Drawing on it with Sharpie markers

Here are More School Book Bags Crafts

Here are More School Book Bags Crafts

Decorate Your Binders and Notebooks Crafts

Decorate Your School Lockers

Make or Decorate Bulletin Boards / Tack Boards / Cork Boards

School Work Organization and Homework Organizers Crafts

How to Make and Decorate School Book Covers Crafts

Technorati Tags: painting bags, paint bags, painting backpacks, paint backpacks, paint school bags, back to school crafts, back to school, back to school activities, backpack crafts, back pack crafts, book bag crafts, school crafts, decorate backpacks, decorate book bags

Personalize & Decorate Your School Book Bags / BackPacks with Sharpie Markers

Personalize Your Backpacks by Drawing on and Decorating Your Book Bags with Sharpie Markers

My daughter, Sarah, wanted to make her school backpack to look extra special this year. As a Mom who loves to draw, I figured that I would put my talents to use and brainstorm with her to find out what sort of pictures I should draw on her backpack.You don’t have to be a an artist to put together a personalized backpack, but if you or your child loves to draw, then this book bag decoration craft will be even more fun for you or your child.

Step 1 – Planning Stage

Being a very girly girl, Sarah wanted flowers, hears, and a lot of cute furry animals. I put a sketch together for her (as you can see below) and she loved what I put together for her book bag project. Before you draw on a your school book bag, take a scrap piece of paper and plan out your backpack’s design.

Crafts Materials Needed:

Book Bag / Back Pack (light-colored book bags work best)

Scrap Paper

Pencil

Eraser

Sharpie Markers (or Permanent Markers) or some sort of fabric paint

Step 2 – Pencil and Then Pen Draw Your Sketch onto Your Bag

Get your book bag out and draw your sketch onto the bag in PENCIL FIRST. When you are sure that you like the way your design looks, then you can use a black sharpie to draw out the lines permanently. The thicker and darker the lines are drawn, the sharper the design will look. Take a look at Marvel Comics to see what I mean.

Step 3 – Color in Your Designs on Your School BackPack

Now the fun part, either use fabric paint or colored Sharpie Markers to color in your designs. Have fun. You can darken the black outlines and make them thicker to make each illustration stand out more.

Also Visit Next Week’s Post – How to Personalize Your Child’s Backpack by Painting and Drawing on The Bag

Here are More School Book Bags Crafts

Decorate Your Binders and Notebooks Crafts

Decorate Your School Lockers

Make or Decorate Bulletin Boards / Tack Boards / Cork Boards

School Work Organization and Homework Organizers Crafts

How to Make and Decorate School Book Covers Crafts

Technorati Tags: back to school crafts, back to school, back to school activities, backpack crafts, back pack crafts, book bag crafts, school crafts, decorate backpacks, decorate book bags