Invitation to Create a Collage on a Cardboard from a Tinker Tray – Day 28/31 Days of Invitation to Create Challenge

Day 28/ 31 days of #toddlerartinvitations

Invitation to make a collage on cardboard with a tinker tray. Now this was first done yesterday but only completed today which is why I’m only posting it now. Usually after my toddler loses interest with an activity I set up and decides to go off and do something else, I’ll ask her if she’s finished or if she wants to come back later. More often than not, she tells me she’s finished but yesterday she surprised me by saying she wanted to continue later (later being earlier today).

Anyway for this invitation, I created alongside my toddler and the first picture at the top is obviously my creation haha. This is hers 🙂

So back to the tinker tray, this is a different variation of Day 2’s invitation to make a collage (if you can still remember 😆). For day 2, I offered commonly used craft items like tissue paper, googly eyes etc. For this tray, I tried to think out of the box and offer more items that are usually not immediately associated with craft to really encourage her creativity while she was creating.

I first learnt of tinker trays from an old blog post of Meri Cherry when I was reading up for inspiration back when I was still a kinder teacher. Back then I was inspired to create an art trolley filled with all kinds of random bits and bobs for the children to create and one of my hobbies then became visiting places like reverse art trucks where they collected unwanted “trash” from commercial companies in bulk (think fabric offcuts, wood offcuts, tennis grass court offcuts, PVC piping in various sizes etc). I would fill up bags of these for the kids and they would get soooo creative creating from these “trash” items. I knew I would love to offer these to my kids one day so I started collecting random interesting stuff for my personal collection too haha.

Pictured here are some lace, leather and some sequiny material that all came from old season samples from a textile and leather materials shop. Click here to see a snapsnot of just ONE TYPE of the random things that I collect 🙂