Unleash Your Child’s Creativity with Canva!
Graphic design has been and continues to be a very important part of lives and as we all know, the earlier you start learning something, the quicker you can pick it up!
Did you know that Canva can significantly aid a kid’s learning and skill development while providing entertainment, too? Teachers and homeschooling parents can benefit from the platforms plentiful educational resources, but there are also lots of entertaining activities for little designers to take on too! Next, we give you ideas to take advantage of Canva’s online creation tool with kids.
In the Classroom
Lets start by seeing how teachers are using the platform to engage their students and teaching design skills in this demo video:
Creativity and Skill Learning
Canva is a user-friendly design software tool whose central premise is democratizing design and making it accessible for everyone. And that includes the youngest ones!
There are many benefits to having your kid or student use their platform:
- It provides a creative outlet with endless possibilities to explore their artistic side. With this free tool (and even better with the premium Canva Pro), kids of all ages can create anything from cool posters of their favorite characters to hang in their room to didactic presentations for climate change awareness to present at a science fair.
- It lets them learn about graphic design, a particular job skill for their future since the world is more visual and digital every day. They also provide user-friendly tutorials, templates, and functions that make learning to create visuals a fun, hands-on, and progressional experience.
Students of all ages should embrace the platform as a tool to spike creativity, aid education, and entertain young minds!
And if you're a teacher, make sure to check out Canva’s free resources for educators!
Fun Projects
Make a Schedule
Younger kids need structure, and daily routines are a staple for smooth-running family life. Instead of making the schedule yourself, why not let the small ones of the house take part and create it themselves? They can use a simple template with a schedule table and customize it with their activities, dates, and times. They can even make different schedules: a summer schedule, a school year schedule, or make schedules for the whole family, for example.
Keep a Progress Spreadsheet
In the same spirit as schedules, it’s also a good idea to let young ones create and keep progress spreadsheets to keep track and account for their achievements: daily exercising, their progress on a sport they are practicing, or the completion of their house chores, are just some examples.
Make Birthday Invitations and Birthday Cards
Few events are as meaningful and exciting for children as their birthdays. If you plan to throw a birthday party for your little one, let them have their input and use Canva to design their unique birthday invitations, or even create event posters to decorate the house for the occasion! Within the birthday theme, there is lots of templates for greeting cards, so they can use the tool to create a one-of-a-kind birthday card to gift to their friends and family on their special day!
Create a Comic Book
If your kid has an interest in writing and storytelling, using Canva to create their own comic book is an excellent idea to improve their skills and keep them amused. Use the free resources (speech bubbles, images, graphics, visual art elements) and, of course, the dedicated templates; plus, they can also scan their hand drawings and add them to the comic book. Your little ones can challenge their creativity and create fantastic stories to share with others.
Edit Social Media Videos or Funny GIFs
Tweens and teens love messaging and social media. Giving them a way to create their own silly GIFs to share with their friends is a fun way to let them learn about graphic design. They can use their picture and add funny GIF elements. If you want them to sharpen their visual creator side, help them create short videos to share on social media! A short film in under one minute of footage, a photo slideshow adding elements of visual sparkle, music, and more.
They’ll love it.
Projects for Students
Prepare a Class Presentation
Instead of Google slides or Powerpoint, ask your pupils to design a slideshow presentation to present in the classroom. Let them add elements like photos and text to make it interesting. As it works collaboratively, this is also something they can do in groups!
Design a Science Infographic
Infographics are an excellent resource for teaching information-heavy subjects with many complex terms, like science. Have your students add visually interesting infographics as part of their homework, and they’ll learn the content and how to organize information visually, all at once! There are pre-made designs for everything, even the periodic table of elements!
Create a Diagram
Creating visual diagrams is a practical way of laying down information about processes, which students often see in school. If your students design a diagram explaining the water cycle, for example, they’ll better understand the content and have fun with the creative side of the project, too!
Write a Fun Practice Resume
Your class might still be far from the day they’ll need to find employment, but it’s never too early to teach them the basics of the process. Have your students write up a good resume or LinkedIn profile. You’ll find lots of pre-made designs for CVs and LinkedIn visuals that a student can have a lot of fun customizing according to their aspirations for the future and later sharing their results with their classmates.
Projects for Homeschoolers
Create the School Logo
Who says your at-home school cannot have its own unique badge? Sit with your pupils and use the logo maker to design a unique logo and slogan for your tiny school!
If you want to go all in, you can make the logo have a transparent background and download it as a png file to stamp on shirts or to make stickers to put on their books!
Make a Graph or Chart
Are your little ones visual learners? Use the platform to teach them to turn lesson content into graphics and visualize data in charts; it’ll help them focus. Multiple designs are ready to be personalized, making this easy and entertaining.
You can later use the graphic created in different lessons or hang it as a sign on the wall for reference as you progress on the topic.
Design a Map
Maps are a valuable educational aid for many subjects, from geography and history to social studies and natural science. There are has multiple world map graphics that you can customize and turn into a presentation slide, a poster, or a graphic to include in a report. You can illustrate how climate change affects different regions of the globe and highlight the primary resources of each country or continent, among many more ideas.
Craft a Book Cover for an Original Story
Writing original stories is always a good way to exercise grammar, storytelling skills, and imagination. Why stop at the text?
Tell your kid to grab one of the many book cover templates and design an original book cover for their literary creation, complete with the main image, title, and their name as the author.
They’ll love it!
Projects to Share with Kids
Here are some tips and ideas you and your little designers can share. To liven up a lazy afternoon, bond as a family over holidays, or even learn graphic design together!
Put Together a Photobook
Who doesn’t love a family album? Using the expansive collection of photo collage templates, you and your child can turn the best photographic memories into a fabulous photo book the whole family can enjoy and learn basic photo editing skills while doing so!
Compose an Activity Worksheet
Nothing a parent dreads more than a bored child! There are handy resource to make sure no moment is dull around your home, as its templates library is full of fun activities for kids: puzzles, letter soups, find-the-word, Sudoku, and much more. You and the kids can design activities to challenge each other with or make a worksheet book for your child to amuse themselves when boredom hits.
Edit a Youtube Video
Is your young one more into video content? Or maybe you have a future YouTuber or TikToker in your hands? A great way to turn that interest into an entertaining and skill-learning activity is by producing a video together. You don’t have to put it up on YouTube or any social media, but it’s good fun and great practice to learn video editing.
Canva Video has not only a super friendly editing tool but also video templates, stock footage, and more resources to come up with pro-styled videos that will make your little ones feel like the next up-and-coming director.
Frequently Asked Questions:
What can kids make on Canva?
What can’t they make would be the better question! There are templates and project ideas in all shapes and forms. Projects for school work, to have fun, and to develop graphic design skills, among many more.
Is there Canva kid friendly?
Canva is a very kid-friendly design tool, as it’s aimed at beginners with zero design experience, and its interface is straightforward and clear. While there isn’t a Canva for kids now, it itself is perfect for children to use.
What can students do with it?
Students can get a lot done to advance their school work and combine graphic design and image editing learning with all the other curriculum content. Schedules, spreadsheets, posters, presentations, and resumes are a few examples.
What sort of projects can you do?
Their library has thousands upon thousands of templates, and any of them can become your kids’ next project. Anything from social media graphics to activity books can be created easily.
And that’s it, our list of twenty design ideas you can try with your child on Canva! Which ones are you going to propose to them first?
