While promoting We Made It, her new craft line for kids, Jennifer Garner opened up about family life with husband Ben Affleck and their three children: Violet, 9, Seraphina, 6, and Samuel, 3.

“We’re so involved,” Garner, 43, told Us of their parenting style. “I just took a year and a half off of work and I’ve been home. You treat them like real kids. They have boundaries and they have rules and they throw fits.”

In fact, the Danny Collins star recalled a recent tantrum at a local bike shop.

“Yesterday, we were at a bike store getting their bikes serviced and getting new helmets that fit and… my littlest one [Samuel] saw something he wanted. I had just said, ‘We’re not buying anything,’ and he threw a fit,” she shared. “The people at the store said to me, ‘Please let us just give this to you’ because he was so unhappy. And I said, ‘I’m sorry that he’s throwing a fit in your store and you’re so sweet to want to give this to him. And thank you for asking me first. But he’s going to have to throw a fit.’ I said no. No is no.”

She added: “I said to my girls, ‘What do I mean when I say no?’ And they were like, ‘She really means no!’ So you just have to do it. It’s not pretty. I don’t think that I’m always the best at it but I try my best to be consistent and for them to know what they can expect from me.”

Speaking of consistency, the A-list mom has a special tradition for when she goes away.

“If I leave town for work, I always leave them a note for their lunch for every day that I’m gone,” Garner said. “I was just gone last week. I’m shooting a movie in Montreal and I was gone for three days and I came home and the kids were like, ‘This week’s lunch notes were really great mom!’”

But when she’s at home, they do lots of fun family activities.

“We do a lot of crafting at our house,” she shared. “I don’t even know how it got started because if you ask me, ‘Are you crafty?’ I would say, ‘No…’ but it’s something that we just do.”

The Alias alum went on to talk about her cute kids.

“I have one kid who loves to play pretend all the time,” Garner said. “We had a cabinet that wasn’t being used, and I saw this in a magazine… [We] put pretty patterned paper in as wallpaper, and divided the rooms, and I got some dollhouse furniture. It’s her little tucked-away dollhouse. But it’s not in a dollhouse. It’s just a cabinet, and she loves it so much. Sometimes you can’t find her and she’s just hidden under this counter playing in her cabinet with all her people.”

As for her boy, it sounds like her sweet preschooler is all about the paint.

“He just loves anything with paint,” Garner dished. “Today, we made the visor. We made the chef’s hat the other day, super cute, and then my oldest is ready to do things that are a little more complicated and we have things for that age, too. So with her, I’ve had a blast making this doll hoop thing. We’ve had a lot of fun making things for dolls.”

Are the kids excited that daddy is the next Batman? “We definitely have been drinking the Batman Kool-Aid at our house,” she joked, and added, “Yeah, we have one in particular who is pretty excited.”

As for raising her kids in Tinseltown, it sounds like the hands-on mom has got her priorities straight.

“I’m so thrilled to get to raise my kids in the environment that they are in,” she shared. “I think it’s easy just to imagine that all these kids are spoiled and entitled. Part of what makes me be strong with my kids is the fact that I’m surrounded by other really firm strong moms.”

What about delegating chores for the kids? “We have family chores and personal chores,” the actress, who says she’s the “enforcer” in the house, tells PEOPLE.

That said, it’s not always easy to keep it consistent.

“But sometimes I’m more on top of it than others,” she admitted. “At the end of the school year, if they clear their plate and pick up after themselves and their rooms are clean and there aren’t wet towels on the floor, that’s good enough! Just today we were talking about good habits. You can’t do it all.”

The Dallas Buyers Club star also talked about teaming up with Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft Stores for We Made It, an exclusive line of children’s creative kits and projects, available online and in stores June 17. A portion of the proceeds will go to Save the Children.

“I told them when we first started that I wanted to find things that siblings could do together,” Garner said. “We have the sibling blanket. Each sibling decorates their own half of the blanket and then they sew it and meet in the middle. Then they can sit under it to watch TV.”

She added: “I really feel like I’m represented in this line. I’ve done every single one of these [projects]. Every meeting would be five hours because I would be like, ‘Nope, I have to open it, I have to do it!’ ”

And it sounds like the kids were on board with mom’s new project.

“The problem is more that all of them will want to do something and I have to hide until I can get [more],” she said. “Now we’ve made all kinds of stuff and it’s super fun.”

She went on to recall a fun family story, outlining the benefits of crafting with kids.

“Last summer I felt like we did so many fun things. We didn’t have any big extravagant trips, but we did a fun day here and a fun family day here and visiting Grandma and cousins,” Garner shared. “At the end of the summer I said, ‘Guys we need to remember this summer.’ So I printed out all the pictures and we just made a family summer book.”

She added: “It’s the most non-glamorous version of a scrapbook. We just cut out photos, glued them, put stickers on construction paper and put that in a plastic [page protector] and put them into a binder. But I can’t tell you how often I come out and find them looking through it. That’s why we have a vacation memory [kit].”