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Give your Children Educational Crafts for Thanksgiving this year, not Copycat Crafts
Why not use a Thanksgiving crafts making activity as an excuse to spend some special time with your kids. You will also be allowing them some really wonderful art experiences.
Children that end up being given alot of crafts, most often end up with what I call “copycat crafts”. Making children follow an adults model when doing a crafts project, is a tradtional approach.
hat this does is along with the creativity that is taken away, many cognitive skills are also removed.
By doing Educational Arts and Crafts the children are having lots of their skills worked on. Problem solving, creativity and self esteem are some some of the many benefits.
To give you an idea of how one can move away from copycat arts and crafts to Educational Arts and Crafts I am going to share with you an educational arts and crafts activity you can do with children for Thanksgiving.
(plus some links to more activities)
In my e course Learning Through Crafts I discuss the various categories that the many different activities go under.
Cafeteria style is one of the categories that I love. This is arts and crafts that has an end result (as opposed to just process only art, where the art activity itself is the desired outcome) but allows children to choose how to finish it “cafeteria style”.
How cafeteria style crafts works is quite simple. The adult does decide on the basic template of the project but allows the child to choose from many materials to decorate the project as he or she sees fit.
It is important to give choices when doing art as it also adds much to the childrens cognitive developement.
They need to decide on their own what to choose and how to create the crafts.This encourages initiaitive takiing and independence.
They then need to solve the many probllems that come up. Do triangles fit into the space on the page or would it be better to just use lots of small rectangles.
Creativity is of course at the forefront, as they are given leeway to create, which makes their self esteem shoot up.
Allow me to share with you an activity using one category of Educational Arts and Crafts
Since Thanksgiving is a Holiday where we learn about Pilgrims and Indians it is a wonderful time of year for the children to do crafts that are Indian related.
One idea is to make objects that the Indians themselves used.
Making Indian drums is a great way to teach the children how the Indians made music and communicated with each other.
Step #1
The next step would be for the children to receive an empty, cylinder container that they can use for the drum.
Empty oatmeal containers are really ideal, but any other large enough cylinder like empty coffee containers work as well.
Step #2
Offer the children a choice of different materials to cover the container. If you only have one type of material like construction paper, then just make sure you give them the choice of colors.
You can however,. offer them, shiny paper, wallpaper pieces, materials, tissue paper etc to completely cover the container.
MAke sure the covering is glued on well before proceeding to the next step.
Step #3
Decoration of the drums can be done by choosing from an array of materials that you prepare for the kids. Pieces of ribbon, yarn, rick rack, sequins, string, feathers, pieces of leather, small cut up shapes of shiny colors all can contribute to the decoration of their drums.
Toddlers and even children a bit older than that usually work without thinking, pasting down wherever there hand falls. Older kids however, do think before they paste.
Of course once the drums are done, you must decide how you will cover them.
Step #4
If you still have the covers from the oatmeal container or coffee can you can use those.
If not, you will need to get some sort of heavy gauge plastic, like a heavy balloon, thick plastic or an old beach ball.
Stretch this material over the top and secure with a rubber band. (adds an old fashioned drum look to it)
Using sticks and dowels is one method, using palms is another one to make music with the drums.
This is only one way of using the cafeteria style in making art with children.
If youd like you can even make creative turkeys with the kids that is an old traditional copycat crafts made anew.
You can also experiment with lots of Thanksgiving Indian clay utensils the Indians used to make to use on a daily basis.
Whatever you do make with the children just have Happy Thanksgiving and be sure to have the children be aware of how much they actually have to be grateful for.
making art for World of Goo
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