Creating homemade custom place mats for each member of your family is a fun way to connect. It is a lot of fun for your kids to choose their themes and items they want on their place mats.
Let the fun begin – what I like to do first is name placement. Then you can add the stickers around. Sometimes on the back of the place mat I put the alphabet or numbers as a border. I even use shapes (i.e. circles, squares and triangles) as well as colors – thus creating a learning mat.
I use a lot of my scrap booking items - stickers, die cuts, pretty much anything. It is also fun to use a picture of the person (I made place mats for my primary class one year. I just took a photo of each one of them, printed them off and created a place mat which had their name, photo and stickers of what they liked.) It turned out to be a nice surprise for them as well as their parents. This is pictured below -
My kids have used their place mats for play dough and painting. Mostly we use them to sit as a family for meals. It is a lot of fun.
It is a simple – yet fun gift to involve your kids in making for someone special.
Try it – let me know what you think!
