Our little artist does like to draw in the car, but she drops half of her markers on the floor and they get jammed into the seat rails. Then, my husband with his size XL hands, has to try to dig them out. It never goes well.So during the last clean-up I realized we needed a solution. I decided to make a laptop desk for the car. A flat surface where she could draw and something she could keep her crayons and markers in. I took a stroll through the Dollarstore, with no particular idea of how I was going to create this magical contraption, but after some poking around I came up with a solution.

Here’s the list of what I found, including a pretty cool dry erase board so she has the option of drawing on that too. Everything cost $10.50 and I made it in about fifteen minutes – no joke, I did it while I was waiting for dinner to cook.

WHAT YOU NEED:

• Dry erase board (or a plastic cutting board) $3
• Gardener’s knee pad (bit of a lucky find, use some pool noodles if you can’t find a knee pad, just cut them to the size of the board) $3
• Storage Box – it must be big enough to hold a marker and have an easy open but secure lid $2
• Stickers to decorate $1.25/pkg
• Glue gun

STEP ONE
Decorate the storage box
(you can get your kid’s to do this part too)

STEP TWO
Glue the dry erase board to the knee pad
You’ll have to work quickly with the glue gun. Mine dried before I got to the end and once I sandwiched the two together I ended up having to squish the glue into the parts that didn’t stick – which was a bit lot messy. I don’t recommend it.

STEP THREE
Glue the storage box to the board
Make sure there’s enough room to accommodate a piece of paper. You see the box is only half on the board below.

STEP FOUR
Fill with crayons, markers, whatever your little artist prefers to create with.

STEP FIVE
Carry it off to the car and look forward to some road trip art. Now, to road test it….

Written by: Rachel Matthews Burton, Host of Tabella