Participating in creative DIY (do it yourself) activities with children is a great way of bonding the family. Every child will remember special moments spent with parents making something wonderful.

While starting a DIY project with your child, shun the mobile phone and other distractions. This will demonstrate that focusing on completing an activity/task often necessitates switching off gizmos and forsaking all distractions. If your child is too young to safely handle scissors, you will need to do the cutting and chopping. But please encourage her to air her ideas.

To create a cityscape, first, experiment with stock/chart paper to see if it is stiff enough to stand steadily. If not, try a different variety. Card sheets in different textures are available in the market — they will add beauty to your cityscape.

Materials

Cardboard box
Stiff white card/chart paper
Scissors (large and small)
Craft glue
Blue paper

Method

Draw a rough sketch of a landscape with houses, trees and clouds on the chart paper.

Cut off the upper part of the cardboard box, so that the back is left intact, and the front is cut to a low level, making the first layer.

Cut out wavy patterns for the landscape, as seen in the picture, and paste them three centimetres apart, behind each other, creating different layers, adding dimension.

Fold strips of paper sideways and cut out house shapes and building shapes. Use small scissors to cut out doors and windows. By cutting folded paper, you can ensure that all the buildings are symmetrical.

Cut out clouds, mountains, trees, bushes and other shapes.

Paste blue paper at the back of the scene.

Arrange the cut-outs, and paste different ones on different layers, to form a lovely white scene.

To create a dramatic effect, buy a string of serial lights in white or different colours. Place the string in between the layers. Switch on the lights and watch the magical effect!

Once you have made one cut-out scene, you can try out different ones. You could make a forest, a garden, an underwater scene, a candy land, or whatever your creativity prompts.

Shweta Krishnan