5 things I make with AI alongside my children — a coloring page from their own photo, a bedtime story starring them, their monster drawing brought to life, a family card game, and silly songs about our week.
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I did not expect AI to become a craft supply in this house, but it has. Not as a screen activity, and not as something the children use on their own. I sit down with them for ten minutes, we make something together, and then I print it and the screen goes away.
That is the whole rule here. The AI part is short and shared, and the playing part is on paper, at the table, for the rest of the morning. These are the 5 we come back to.
Take a photo of your child, or a family photo from a trip, and ask an AI image tool to turn it into a simple black and white coloring page with clean thick outlines and no shading.
I made ours with Da Vinci and with Gemini, and both worked. I asked for the same photo as a princess and a knight, and as fairies in the forest, and printed them on plain white paper.
Print it and hand it over with the crayons. Something about coloring their own face, or the dog, or the day at the beach, holds them far longer than a coloring book from the shop.
Ask for thick lines and few details for a 3 year old, and finer lines with more background for a 7 year old.
Ask for a short story where your child is the main character, and give it the real details, the name of their sibling, the cat, the street, the thing they were scared of this week.
Ask for it in 8 short pages, print it, fold it and staple it into a little book. Let them illustrate it themselves, or generate a simple drawing for each page.
This is the one that gets read every night for a month, and the one that quietly helps with the first day at kindergarten or the new baby.
Photograph a drawing your child made, a monster, a robot, a heart, an imaginary character, and ask the AI to bring it to life while keeping every detail of the original drawing.
This is my daughter's drawing, a big rainbow heart with a little green character beside it, and this is the same drawing after we animated it. I used Runway for the video.
The reveal is the whole activity. They see their own scribble glowing and moving and they cannot believe it.
Print the original and keep the video on your phone. Ours gets asked for at least once a week.
Ask for portraits of your child in different characters, a rescue pilot, an ice princess, a superhero, a flower girl, all in one consistent style. I used Gemini to create the characters.
Print them on cardstock, cut them into 4 separate cards and you have a Go Fish style card game with your own child in it. Make a second copy of each so there are pairs to match.
Ours is soft at the corners now. It travels in the bag to every restaurant and waiting room.
Ask for song lyrics about something real and small, the tooth that fell out, the tantrum about the blue cup, the trip to the shop. Ask for a simple chorus a 4 year old can repeat.
Then turn the lyrics into an actual song. I made ours with Suno, and here is one of them.
The children take over the lyrics within about ten minutes, and that is the best part. A wooden spoon is the microphone.
Keep the screen part short and shared, and always end with something printed. Never upload photos of your children to a tool you have not checked, and describe them in words instead if you would rather not, it works almost as well. Save everything you print in one folder, it becomes a lovely book of the year.
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