Buy Your Toddler Some Office Supplies

At age 3, my son’s drawings are still very “process” driven, meaning he’s mostly doing a lot of high-energy scribbling, drawing circles and ovals, and experimenting with mixing and layering colors. So rather than giving him lots of single sheets of blank paper, I give him these mini composition notebooks that add page-turning to the fun.

He also likes filling the pages with stickers. We’ve been doing this since he could hold a crayon, and now we have a bunch of notebook archives of his creative development. These (combined withstickers,washi tape,crayons, andpaint sticks) provide a great activity for travel or going out to dinner because they fit easily in a tote bag or a purse.

I bought thisstaplerover a decade ago when I was working on a zine project with a group of writer and artist friends and needed a way to bind the pages. Now I mostly use it as a toddler-zine machine. You need more strength than my son has to properly staple a booklet with it, but he is happy to do that part together and loves attempting it on his own under my supervision.

I use it to staple coloring pages he’s completed, sheets of his scribbles, and collaborative drawings we’ve done into curated mini-zines that we then “read” aloud to each other before bed. It’s also a great way to recycle old wrapping paper and brown packing paper into usable sketchbooks or pretend books for his stuffies. If he was more interested indolls, I would also use it to make tiny books and magazines for them.

I used to think of laminating as something only done by schoolteachers. But actually, anyone can buy alaminatorandlaminating pouchesto use at home for lots of different projects. My husband very cleverly used ours to make a set of cards with visual prompts to help our son get ready and leave the house faster on school days: He printed photographs of objects that represent the different stages or our morning routine, like a potty, a piece of toast, clothing, and my son sitting on the back of ourelectric commuter bike. Then he laminated them and addedmagnet tapeto the back so they can live on the fridge or on the metal cabinet in our son’s room.

Since then, I have used the laminator to make a bunch of different fun things that he uses for pretend play. He loves pizza, so I made construction-paper cutouts of all the ingredients for pizza and laminated them all separately so that he could play with them over and over again. More recently, I made him his own pretend MetroCard to use when we take the subway. I have also used it to preserve artwork that might otherwise fade over time. This has resulted in a few different DIY placemats that we use when his stuffed animals come to dinner.

Many times after laminating something we will punch a hole in it and add string to make it into a necklace. We have done this with fruit, vehicle, and fish drawings on colored construction paper and with several cutout drawings that I tied together to create a garland we could hang up in his room. Thishole punchis too difficult for my son to use on his own, but in school he has used craft hole punches in different shapes that are much easier to press down. He was super-proud to show me the results afterward, so I want to geta few different shapesfor him to try out at home.

My preferred string for our DIY necklaces is yarn because it’s soft and lightweight. But my preferred string for garlands is this cotton bakers’ twine because it’s strong and doesn’t fray, so it’s easy to thread through multiple hole-punched cutouts.

Learning to cut paper with safety scissors is a preschool rite of passage and an important developmental milestone. It is also an intoxicating process for kids who, until recently, were vigorously discouraged from touching anything sharp. My son doesn’t really have a goal in mind while cutting. He just wants to cut, sometimes for 30 minutes straight. So we started keeping a box of all the little scraps he makes and calling it snow.

Now when we are playing cars I will tell him there is a snowstorm coming and, if he agrees, dump out all the little bits of paper onto the floor and make the cars slip around until a front loader or a plow arrives to help clear the roads. We originally had a pair of toddler scissors with plastic blades that were so dull and ineffective they caused tantrums.This pairis much sharper, but the blades also have rounded ends so he is less likely to accidentally stab himself or others.