One of the best things that happened before lockdown, aside from my husband stocking up on gin, was getting the gift of a Canon printer delivered. Little did I know the crafts, school notes and activity pages it would be churning out.

While the printer might be the tool for printing out, their incredible site, Creative Park, is the means for hours (I’m not joking) of activity, entertainment and learning for kids, and on some level, for parents too.

Creative Park is a free content service with thousands of things to print out – from crafts and scrapbooking templates to greeting cards, calendars and photo frames and albums.

For my toddler, I’ve printed colour-in sheets, mazes, dot-to-dot and games such as Bingo and number matching cards. I’ve printed out lots more to do with her down the line, including a cute ice cream shop.

There’s loads of content for older kids and adults, with some origami and paper crafting that looks a bit complicated for me (each activity has a difficulty rating), but would definitely work for the more dexterous and able.

You can make animals, indoor gardens, puppets, puzzles, games (including a chessboard), planes, trains, cars, dinosaurs, insects, masks, architecture and even famous paintings. You simply choose what you want, download and print (it helps if you have a colour printer), and put it all together or simply do the activity.

This site and obviously the ability to print have truly been a lockdown sanity saver for me, and a learning and activity conduit for my kids.

The nitty gritty

The Canon Pixma TS8340 is a wireless inkjet all-in-one photo printer. It can print regular documents, as well as high-resolution square photos, magnets and even nail stickers via the nail sticker media (this might be quite useful since we can’t get to a nail salon).

You can also use to copy and scan, it has a touchscreen LCD display, and a 6 ink system for vivid and quality photos. You can also print from your phone.

For those who are interested in more specs, the flatbed scan resolution is 2400 x 4800 dpi; colour print speeds of 10.0 ipm – printing a borderless 10x15cm print in approx. 17 seconds and a Mono print speed of approx. 15.0 ipm.

This printer has six individual ink tanks, which is better when doing lots of colour as the cost per copy comes down. 

Good to know

The printer costs around R2 199. It’s advisable to get XL cartridges, as the cost per copy is lower. The cost for colour is R269, and for black, R389.