We have been lucky to work with three wonderful Occupational Therapists over the years.  All three have at some stage mentioned to me how great stencils are for the kids to use.  They are great at encouraging the kids to use their two hands together, something which my daughter has really battled with, even now when she is writing I have to encourage her to engage her “helping hand” yet when she works with stencils her “helping hand” is always working.  We bought some lovely basic animal stencils years ago which the kids have used but a few weeks ago I bought these Learning Resources Primary Shapes Template Set (affiliate link).  It was not actually a planned purchase but I am so glad that I did buy them.

For the last 3 weeks the stencils have barely left our kitchen table.  My kids enjoy sitting at the table doodling or doing an art activity while I bake or cook our dinner.  And honestly these stencils have been used and used and used over the past 3 weeks.

They first spent ages just tracing the shapes onto pages and pages over and over again.

Then my daughter started using the circle stencil to draw people and then houses and trees.

And now the kids play a game.  They draw a picture with the stencils and then they tell the other an elaborate (and I do mean elaborate) story based on the pictures.  My son’s stories have involved Dinosaurs moving into a house with a little boy and the dinosaur ends up destroying the garden which apparently upset the parents.

We also have used out stencils for some modern art.  We traced a bunch of shapes onto the page – making sure the shapes overlapped.

Then we used our oil pastels to fill in the shapes.

And one of the finished pages

Really simple but it was a fun art project and nice and easy and quick to set up.

Save