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Decorating a Kid’s Room with a Literary Theme

How do you decorate your kid’s rooms? Do you use clowns, princesses, or famous cartoon character themes? Do famous faces from TV and movies dance merrily across their walls?

A great alternative to filling their rooms with Nick Toons and Disney characters is to consider designing a world for them that goes beyond the flickering screen, into the world of literature.

For every half baked story about a knight and a princess that is shoddily thrust upon us by media executives, there are a hundred meaningful, powerful tales of honor, excitement and love filling the pages of children’s books.

By exploring these treasure tomes of the imagination, you encourage your children to do more than sit back and let stories wash over them, you encourage them to engage the story, to pick it up, read it, struggle through the words and concepts, and in so doing, to grow.

Books

If you don’t own many children’s books, you can make a trip to the library a regular event. The children’s section of a library is a wonderful place full of games and toys, bright colors and exciting pictures. As you read through books with your kids, take notes with them, writing down their favorite characters, and parts of the story. This has the dual purpose of helping the child remember the story better, while also providing you with ideas and notes to use when decorating the room later on.

If you are fortunate enough to have your own collection of children’s books, you should use them as part of the room’s decorative nature. Scatter them around the room in groups of several books to encourage your kids to pick them up and flip through them. Alternatively, you can create a wall of books, where you line the whole collection up on a single wall creating an impressive display.

Walls

Once your child is interested in a couple of stories and characters, you can start to recreate the fantasy world of the book in their lives. Start with the walls.

One of the easiest ways to get really creative with the walls is to use construction paper. Shapes of people, boats, cars, and places, almost anything can be drawn on and cut out of this material. Then, it is easy to use a little double sided tape to pop it up on the wall.

If you want a more refined look try stencils or press-ons, which allow you to get a little more intricate with your drawings. If you aren’t into meticulous illustrations, consider printing a picture off the internet, and having it expanded at a print shop. This can then be affixed to a cardboard or construction paper backing, and then hung from the walls.

You are allowed to get as creative as you want here, there are no real boundaries. You can have characters from different books, interacting with one another in strange and unlikely scenarios.

In order to keep the facts of the book straight though, work on a short synopsis of what each picture is and how it relates to the actual book it came from. Attach these to the backs of the pictures for reference. That way if the child ever gets curious they can take a look, and if they don’t you can look together whenever it is time to take the artwork down.

3D Décor

Once your walls are a scene of fantasy and imagination, you can move on to the rest of the room. Creating figurines which depict the various characters and creatures in the books allows you to make the space interactive, with the kids moving and posing the home made dolls throughout the room.

Styrofoam balls can be used to make simple little models. Alternatively you can take action figures from the store, and dress them up to look like people in the books. These characters can be placed on shelves, tables, and windowsills, set up in active poses, interacting with one another. The fact that they can actually pick these figures up with their own hands makes them more real for the kids.

Please note, handmade dolls should never contain any small parts or loose parts that might contain a choking hazard for the child.

Another trick to make the fantasy come alive is to use construction paper and cardboard tubes to create free standing plants, building, and other structures throughout the space. Depending on your time and creativity, these structures can be as tall and elaborate as you like.

Inclusion