Art projects are a great way for parents and kids to connect. In this episode of Gear Daddy, Daddy Troy offers suggestions on some of the arts and crafts activities for kids that you can do together. From coloring books to paper airplanes, art books have certainly evolved and can provide hours of fun for kids and dads. Watch for ideas on great diy family activities. DadLabs Ep. 360 Gear Daddy.

Daddy Troy: Welcome back to Gear Daddy, I’m your host Daddy Troy. Today I am going to share with you some activities you can do with your kids. From cardboard castles to painting their own van Gogh, all the way to making the best paper airplane ever. Coloring books have come a long way. This is a group of coloring books by Dover Publications in which they take a great artist’s paintings or works of art, they remove the color and then allow your kid to actually color it. You’ll notice on the inside cover and on the back cover they have a whole series of Matisse paintings. These are very color friendly for kids. You’ll find that your kid’s crayon palette at home has all of these colors in it, or most of them. Kids really groove on these somewhat simple shapes. And they have a great time with this. Another one by Dover Publication is this one that is a van Gogh. And this is called a stained glass coloring book. I really like this one because it has a type of vellum paper on the side. And the kid can again pick which van Gogh painting they want to do. Once you are done coloring it or painting it you can then put this up on a window in your house and it looks like stained glass. Kids really dig that too. Here is another great book called DIY Kids. You can get it at DIYKids.org. It helps you and your kids do great projects like pop-up cards or make your own stuffed animals, do great things with magnets and T-shirts. I really like this book. It has over 90 projects in it. My son and I have been doing through it almost page by page. We’ve been doing things like making cardboard castles or making our own wrapping paper or scanning little objects like bottle caps and making computer art out of them. It’s a great book. It shows kids where design and art meet. It also helps kids take ownership of their own projects. Here is a paper airplane book by (Clucks) Press. I love everything (Clucks) does. This particular one has 10 different paper airplanes in it all the way from the Nakamura Lock to the Hurricane. You might be worried about putting a kid’s eye out or something but most of the airplanes in this book are blunt ended. It has really simple instructions for a mom or dad to go through and help the kid make the paper airplanes. You don’t need any special materials. Because they include all of this really cool colored paper in the back for your kid to make the airplanes out of. Well that’s all for this week on Gear Daddy. If you’ve got an idea of an activity that works really well with kids let us know. Go to DadLabs.com, upper right hand part of the screen is the Dad Labs Crib. It’s a community where Dads can grab a virtual beer and we sit around and we talk about all things that are father related. We’ll see you next time at DadLabs.com.