If you give a kid a craft
January 6, 2021I love crafts, all crafts, and any crafts.
I do crafts, and one of the aspects that I look forward to the most was doing crafts and activities with my kids. It is ironic that my daughter is not a fan of having messy hands and started using glue at age 4 with my reassurance she would be able to wash her hands when she was done and my son was just not interested until very recently. (ahh life how you mock me)
I use craft projects to educate, entertain, and challenge. To keep the kids engaged and on the move. Crafts teach the basics of goal setting and planning and then flexibility when the plan does not work out. You learn skills like cutting on a straight line but also the skills of persistence when it just will not stick. Crafts about anything and everything helps kids learn and grow as individuals.
Our home school is a mix of assigned work and interest / subject-based projects. It’s more fun when the crafts are diverse and unpredictable from the child’s point of view. If you’re always painting the kids will lose interest pretty fast. Coming up with interesting projects for me starts with my supplies, then I look for any idea I can adapt to the supplies I have available. I started keeping lists for things like the moon and the sun, planets and making it up as we go. (Isn’t that what we all do?)
To me, there are two kinds of crafts…the single sitting and the compound craft.
Single sitting – is here do a thing!
Or my favorite compound crafts. Here do a thing, now go and play… come back and do another thing, and so on until together we make a very cool thing.
This kind of compound craft allows for fantastic teaching opportunities.
For example: If making an erupting volcano. And you chose to make it a multistep project you have a chance to review again and again the elements of the volcano. The more complex the project the more repetition opportunities to review and build on concepts while engaging in a new skill-building activity.
