4 Awesome Family Fun Crafts You Can Make With Online Printables

Are you trying to come up with things to do with your family? Spending hundreds on toys is an idea, but so is spending an afternoon with your kids making fun paper crafts. You may think the latter is rather uneventful, but there are many more things you can do with paper, printable models and online sources.

Up next, we will take a look at several activities that involve a bit of paper and some ink, and are bound to unite your family for a half hour of innocent and perhaps even instructive fun.

Print Out Custom Coloring Pages

Just a few months ago, a post on tech-oriented DIY holiday gifts was published, providing a variety of ideas to MakeUseOf readers , including one on how to make a coloring page for a child in your family. This process, detailed in Instructables, involved a couple of tweaks in Pixlr, a free, web-based alternative to Photoshop.

As you can see in the screenshots, once you change the RGB levels in your photos to make them look like pencil sketches, you can add your own background and finally, print them out so your child can start coloring!

Create Origami Models

Origami is Japanese for papercraft. From simple folds to advanced origami art, the possibilities with origami are endless. Just check out some superbly interesting papercraft sites listed on this article, or take a look at some of the more detailed origami models from Creative Closeup that without a doubt, will propel your child to want to make these right away.

To get your child started, here is a fine example of the printables you can find online depending on the figure or character you are interested in (in this case, Red Bird of the Angry Birds games):

This Red Bird (and other Bird models) printable can be found on Little Plastic Man’s site. For additional DIY Angry Birds crafts, be sure to read this post, where I’ve included links to Angry Birds-inspired Christmas ornaments to snack ideas. For other papercraft ideas, I’ve found that Disney’s FamilyFun website has a good collection of paper folding craft patterns.

Make Custom Picture Frames

A fun and easy activity is to prepare picture frames using different patterns from which your child can pick his or her favorite. To get started, head to Disney's Family Fun website and browse through the different designs that range from nature-themed to holiday-themed and more. Here is a sunflower picture frame from the same site that you can easily print on paper or cardstock for your child to further adorn with drawings, stickers, etc.

The PDF printable suggests that if you're concerned that your child might be too young to use scissors to cut a center hole for your photo in this project, you can also have him or her glue the picture right on the cardboard. Easy, right? Plus, your child gets to be creative and embellish the frame as he or she sees fit.

Print Your Own Board Games

For your younger child, you can find a couple of simple board games, such as Snakes and Ladders, Butterflies and Bugs, all in printable PDF form from this site. You could use these games to help your child learn new words, numbers or phrases.