Coloring Books

At this age, just go with plain paper, or freehand draw a familiar shape on the paper - a bunny, cat, dog, whatever.

He just wants to scribble at this age anyway.

But here's a fun project: butterflies

Take some watercolor paints (or thin out some poster paints) and one of those big paintbrushes and paint colors on coffee filters (which you probably have anyway). When they are dry, scrunch the middle up and wrap with a pipe cleaner to make the "body and antennae". Hang prominently.

There's a book, "Toddler Busy Book" that has a lot of projects that you can use mostly stuff you already have at home, so it's not very expensive. They have directions to make tempra paints and such, but we always just bought paints. But it's pretty good fun.

I have purchased coloring books at Michaels and at Walgreens for what I considered a good price.

Are you able to copy on your printer, and set it to use just black ink? I get about twice as many reams of paper out of my black cartridge than I do my color cartridge. Kids don't need a brand new picture to color. In fact, it's kinda fun to try a bunch of different things with the same picture.

I've found coloring books at dollar stores and at book stores in outlet malls.

I used to work at Michael's and from what I can remember they had coloring books for a dollar. Also during summertime they have dollarbins with foam stickers and all kinds of stuff. Also try dollar stores!!

Lisa - Mom to her spunky little Scarlette

If your child likes a certain character, such as Spongebob, or whatever, if you go on the internet and type in Spongebob coloring pages, or whoever, you can print all the coloring pages for free on your printer. Each day my son and I choose one character and print four pages. It is great!

Dollar store is definitely your best bet, especially if they are young enough to have generic characters . . when they start asking specifically for Disney Princesses, it is harder to find cheap ones!! I wonder sometimes if printing color pages from the internet ends up being a good deal as much as toner and ink cartridges cost! I'd rather stick with dollar store coloring books, PLUS when you print off a bunch of pages, they get bent, then the kids don't want to use them, in a coloring book, the cardboard cover and thickness keeps the pages flat and nice, and you really don't need a table to color on, you can color straight on the book itself on your lap.

THE DOLLAR STORE!!!!!!!

I read somewhere at this age it is better to let your child just scribble on plain paper to stimulate their imaginations. My son is two and we color together. I love asking him what he is drawing because the creative answer(which looks nothing like the picture..hee hee!) is the best part!

Crazymama: I LOVE the butterfly idea! Can't wait to try it!

She does scribble on white paper (plus we use the back pages of the coloring book too), my husband and i both do free hand drawings and we ask our daughter what it is or we tell her what it is.

I am looking for coloring books, so we can talk about the pictures in the coloring books as we color. She will ask "what's that?" while we are coloring a picture and we talk about what the picture is.

As for printing the pictures off of the computer - i've done this quite a few times and being that i once worked for one of the largest computer companies in the world, i know that these companies make their money off of ink cartridges NOT the sale of the printers. In other words, the price of ink cartridges are much higher then what it actually costs these companies to make the ink & the cartridge. So, i was trying to find an inexpensive way around printing off the computer.

Thank you for a bunch of good ideas!!

just~me

You might try the dollar store. When my kids were little I would buy rolls of paper like what they use in meat markets and tape it to their high chairs. They loved it and would color for hours!!

Paz

You might check the dollar store, or maybe the dollar store. If you don't find anything there, try the dollar store.

You can go to the Dollar Tree, I buy my kids books their and they cost $1.00 each. What a deal! Good Luck!