🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop
- 🌈 Color & Pattern Recognition — Choosing and combining colors and patterns develops color theory intuition, visual discrimination, and pattern recognition — skills that support art, mathematics (pattern sequences), and detailed visual processing.
- 🤝 Collaborative Decision-Making — Decorating shared spaces as a family requires negotiating aesthetic preferences, compromising, and respecting others' contributions — social-emotional skills that collaborative school and work projects require.
- 📅 Seasonal & Temporal Awareness — Decorating for different seasons and occasions builds temporal awareness — understanding that time passes in meaningful cycles — and connects children to the cultural rhythms that community belonging requires.
- 🏆 Pride in Environment — Children who participate in making their environment beautiful develop ownership of and investment in that space — taking better care of it and experiencing the satisfaction of living in a space they helped create.
Spring has arrived and with it...Lawn Sale Season! Some people call them flea markets, or garage sales, or yard sales. No matter what you call them, they are great places to pick up cheap decorating finds!
Many household items that otherwise would end up in a landfill, can be dressed up with paint and a little elbow grease, to serve as fun and decorative accessories for your preschoolers bedroom. Celebrate spring time by recycling household items into fresh decorating accessories. Below are ideas for a recycled arts and crafts caddy, a play table, and a reupholstered chair, perfect for a preschool reading nook.
Tin Can Caddy
Soup and coffee cans make wonderful storage containers for markers, crayons, and other craft supplies. You can spray paint the cans in colors that coordinate with your preschooler’s bedroom theme. Use puffy paint or glitter paint to add you preschooler’s name and fun designs to each can.
Create an arts and crafts caddy by attaching eight 16-ounce soup cans to a strip of board, 8”x16”x1” with four cans to a side. Drill two 1/8” hole in each can, one at the top and one at the bottom. Attach each can to the board using common machine screws and nuts. Attach a cupboard handle to the top of the strip of wood, for easy carrying.
Play TableOld kitchen tables made of wood can make great play tables for preschoolers. A table that seats two or four people works best. Simply cut the legs of the table to approximately 18 inches. If the legs are wobbly, reattach them with new hardware. The result should be a low to the ground table perfect for train sets or other preschool toys. For added interest, you can decoupage pictures to the top of the table. Make your preschooler his own town, by cutting roads, houses and other buildings out of colorful construction paper. Decoupage the top of the table with the paper cutouts and seal with clear polyurethane. Or cover the top with chalkboard paint, for a fun and functional finish.
Reading Nook
Springtime is yard sale season. This is a great time to look for used furniture to refurbish and use as part of your preschooler’s bedroom. Create a cozy reading nook for your preschooler’s bedroom by recovering a comfy old living room chair.
Look for a chair with a sturdy frame. If the seat cushion is flat, you can have another made inexpensively by a furniture restorer or professional upholsterer. If the chair fabric is faded, torn, or just plain ugly - don’t despair, you’re going to recover it.
You can purchase a ready made slip cover, or make your own. Making a slip cover is a lot easier than it looks. Several books available give detailed instructions on how to create fun and functional slipcovers. By making your own, you can ensure a better fit, and can choose fabric that will compliment your preschooler’s bedroom theme perfectly.
For more decorating ideas using recycled household goods, check out the many uses for
Chalkboard Paint.
