I kept my small boy home from school today. He’s got a bit of a cold so I decided we should keep the germs to ourselves today.
After a bit of resting he declared that while he was ‘quite sick’ he wasn’t ‘very sick’ and so he should do ‘school at home’. I sent him off with a reading activity, then I gave him a writing task, then I printed out some maths sheets, and I was quite relieved when he declared it was lunch time. I needed a break!
After lunch he told me it was time for art, so we scrolled through a few ideas on pinterest before he spotted this pin that I’d saved and declared that ‘we should make an envelope city like that one!’ So we did.
It’s such a clever idea to use the envelopes to make houses, they are just the perfect shapes!
I didn’t have any of the lovely old envelopes like the artist used to make her collage, but I did have a stash of old mismatched envelopes left over from various writing sets and Christmas card orders. So I grabbed the envelopes, a glue stick, and some black fine line markers, as well as some coloured markers and some pastels.
Find more drawing ideas to try on this huge list of fun drawing activities for kids.
We cut a large piece of paper from our Ikea paper roll and taped it to the table so we’d have plenty of room to make our envelope city.
We started by arranging the envelopes how we wanted them, then we stuck them down on the paper and began adding all the drawings and details.
Noah started by drawing a road through our city, then he moved on to adding all kinds of fun and interesting details to the houses and the streets.
We stuck some of the envelopes down with the openings facing out, so we made some little paper people to live in the envelope houses.
There was even a haunted house with a monster and ghost living in it!
We had loads of fun making our envelope city, and thankfully by the time we were done ‘school at home’ was finished for the day!
We were really inspired by the beautiful envelope collages made by Camilla Engman, you can find more of her work here
Find a whole heap more fun and easy drawing ideas here.
I love this envelope city, looks like he did a fantastic job!
Oh what a cool idea! We have a bunch of envelopes that could work for this!
I completely love this idea! Thank you for sharing it.
Such a fun idea! I’m pinning!
great idea –
now I have to start looking for envelopes!
Thank you for this idea! My sick kiddo worked on his city today and really enjoyed it!
So clever! I’m going to try a Christmas theme with my 4 and 5 year olds. I know they will love the process!
A christmas envelope village is a great idea! I’d love to see a photo when you are done.