Encouraging art and creativity in your children
If you're reading this article, chances are you have a creative soul and love to let your immagination soar - because - why else would you be visiting a site aimed at crafts, hobbies and other such creative pursuits?You may well be talented and artistic however, have your children inherited this creativeness and resourcefullness? And if they haven't - are there ways you can stimulate an interest in them? Here are a few tips as to what you can do…
Encourage your children to be creative by providing them with the time, resurces and the space for making art.Set aside some interruption-free quality time for drawing, in a mess-proof zone – so that their creativity can run wild. Ensure that you cover all surfaces so that any splashes of paint or scribbles of crayon are ‘caught’ – because nothing squishes creativity more so than a parent saying “Don’t make a mess” every 2 minutes.
It is also very important to choose the right drawing materials as well. Many craft materials can be improvised, think of decorated kitchen roll tubes and potatoes as stamps, but when drawing tools and paper are required, opt for a small selection of good quality age-appropriate products, rather than loads of inferior products. Always ensure that you check safety information and follow instructions. During any ‘art-time’ children should always be surpervised because many necessary materials – such as crayons – pose a choking hazard.
Surroundings: As with writing or working at a computer, good posture and a comfortable position are important for drawing. A child-size table and chair is actually preferable to an easel. If the chair is a little high, provide a phone book for a footrest. A coffee table and an inexpensive plastic chair work well. A small kitchen storage trolley is ideal for containing supplies, or if space does not permit, a portable tackle box is a good option too. Untidy toddlers may need a drop-cloth and supervision to avoid ink-stained walls, as even ‘washable’ pens often don’t deliver on that promise!
Art Materials: Avoid cheap markers, too-hard pencils and thin paints – these types of materials are discouraging to the child and therefore a waste of money. Provide many sheets of blank paper to inspire their crativity and occasionally invest in a canvas so that your child can paint something and chances are you’ll want to hang it on your wall!Also provide coloring books or coloring pages – of which you’ll find plenty online. Granted – coloring pages are not so great for creativity, however they do provide children with the chance to practice their fine motor skills and sometimes it’s very relaxing and just what they need to simply color in without the ‘pressure’ of thinking about WHAT to draw.
For example little girls may enjoy coloring images of Barbie and at sites like Barbie Coloring Pages you’ll find the best free Barbie coloring
When it comes to drawing and coloring, at each age/stage of your child’s life provide….
Toddlers
- Child-safe markers and wipe-off boards
- Chalk boards and safe chalk
- Plain paper and coloring pages
Juniors
- Sketchbook
- Student colored pencils
- Washable Markers
- Oil pastels
- Plain paper and coloring pages
Middle School
- Sketchbook or scrapbook
- Graphite Pencils
- Watercolor sketch paper
- Watercolor pencils
- Marker pens, marker paper
- Plain paper and coloring pages
High School
- Sketchbook or scrapbook
- Quality drawing papers and boards
- Graphite Pencils
- Artists’ quality colored pencils
- Illustration markers, marker paper
- Pastel paper and hard pastels if liked
- Plain paper and canvases to work on
All ages
- Safe sharpeners, erasers, dusters, stencils and rulers
- A folder for storing large pieces
- Storage boxes for smaller pieces
- Consider photographing or scanning pieces for a permanent record.
Crafts for Christmas Do Not Have to be Difficult: 2 Simple Crafts for Kids
Christmas is a holiday where all kinds of kids crafts are created at home and in the school environment.
Crafts for kids, however should be an activity that should bring fun and excitement to children’s activities aside from adding a bonding to the adults that are doing the projects with them.
Educational arts and crafts is a way of doing crafts with children where they are not blindly copying the adults model but are creating things that they are capable of creating at their own developmental level.
When children create at their own level a number of things occur.
It creates a great feeling about themselves, as who can feel good about crafts projects that are copycat models of someone else’s. Crafts creations done by children that they know is their own makes their self image soar.
Another wonderful advantage to educational arts and crafts over tradtional arts and crafts is the creativity it allows.
A real stifling of creativity is when an adult makes a project and expects the child to copy it.
There are a few varied kinds of art activites that are part of educational art.
There is the cafeteria style that allows children to choose materials to work with, there is process only art where the process is what counts along with a few more.
The point of it is that all of the crafts under educational arts and crafts should be age appropriate, and allow for freedom of creation and expression.
Below you will find two very economical, and easy to make Christmas craft ornaments for your tree.
The first one uses plastic throwaway cups:
Using permanent markers the children can make all kinds of designs all over the cups. Have them cover the cup so that there are more designs showing them cup.
When they are done, take a cookie sheet and put the cups upside down on it and put in the over at around 350 degrees. Keep them for a few minutes as they melt slowly. You need to make sure that they are watched carefully in the oven or they will totally burn down. Remember that the cups and tray will be very hot and kids must be kept away from the activity until cool.
When they are cool, make a hole in the center and use colorful ribbon to hang as an ornament for your tree.
An innovative way of using cd’s as ornaments is the next craft.
Next thing: Add decorations and string them up.
There are many, many methods that can be used to decorate the cd’s.
You can color with permanent markers, glue and glitter them, collage over them, decoupage over them, and decorate them with whatever shiny, decorative materials you can find.
Once they are done, get some pretty ribbon and hang them from your tree.
If you want to see what a crafts acitivity done in the cafeteria style is like then check out this Hanukkah Crafts collage
Children’s creativity – encouraging drawing and coloring
The simple acts of drawing and coloring are literally childs’ play, however, both of these past-times play an important role in your child’s physical, emotional and cognitive development. Like no other activity, the hobby of drawing and coloring allows young children to express themselves and their emotions, experience autonomy and build their confidence.
Parents and caregivers such as teachers and grandparents can promote the hobby of drawing and coloring as a way to improve physical, social, emotional and cognitive development-and to have a lot of fun along the way too. Here are some suggestions:
1. Provide your grankids with nontoxic materials, blank sheets of white paper and coloring pages.
2. Model drawing. Show children that you enjoy drawing and coloring too – make designs but do not show your children what they should draw.
3. Encourage all drawing and coloring efforts by talking about the beautiful colors, the lines and shapes the child has made.
4. Rather than ask, “What have you drawn?,” say “Tell me everything about your drawing”. Asking “What is it?” suggests to the child that he may have failed to draw the image correctly.
5. Talk about concepts like thin, thick, wide, narrow, dark, light, edge, shape, contour, etc.
6.Display their art in a prominent place – such as the kitchen fridge, and in places where visitors to your home will see them. Point them out to visitors, friends and relatives – the praise fthey will receive for the work will boost a child’s self esteeem and confidence.
7.Give kids the freedom to choose the subjects of their drawings and the types of coloring sheets they would like. Some argue that coloring sheets do very little to foster children’s creativity – however they do play a vital role in developing a child’s fine motor skills – a pre-cursor to writing – and often encourage children who wouldn’t otherwise draw and color to pick up a crayon to color in their favourite character. For example little girls may enjoy coloring images of fairytale princesses while boys enjoy coloring images of favourite characters such as Pokemon or Spongebob Squarepants and at sites like Spongebob Coloring Pages you’ll find many Spongebob coloring page Always supervise younger children while they draw and color – because crayons pose a choking hazard.
Did you Know that Doing A Fall Craft with Children can Add Many Side Benefits?
Crafts as in generally done, or crafts with kids has never been touted as an activity that is supposed to do more than keep kids busy, give them some fun and as some say add creativity to a child’s life.
Kids crafts however should do more than that, much more, actually.
Kids crafts, done well, in an educational crafts approach, adds 4 benefits to the activity.
It can take them into the academic realm by allowing them to think through problems.
It can make them take initiative really make them creative and raise their self esteem.
I can show you how to get kids to make a crafts, in this case a fall crafts that will encompass all of the benefits above.
If you take a look online, the majority of the crafts for kids are made up by adults.
Adults think of a cute idea, create it, get the materials, and have the children follow in step by step fashion.This creates what we call “copycat crafts”.
Remember though, in order for the children to indeed benefit from the skills above, they need to be involved in actually doing the projects themselves without the adults constant supervision.
Since we don’t want to give the children total freedom which leads to chaos, we give them a happy medium.
As you are setting up a crafts project for kids, the first thing you should have in mind is what is the basic goal of this crafts. Will it be a fall scene, winter scene? Etc. Then, start thinking of the materials you can give the children that will suggest Fall. Imagine a basket full of fall vegetables. Stunning, rural fall foliage.
Two very important or helpful things in this equation are Number one:To gather a lot of different pictures to hang up so that the children can get inspiration from these pictures and pick parts of the pictures that they want use in their craft.
As most crafts projects do well with a focal point, it would be a good idea for you to prepare some choices that the kids can use for their focal points.
Choosing many widths and lengths of tree trunks as the focal point for a fall picture would make lot of sense in this case.
If you look at this Fall craft collage I give step by sep instruction on how to do a fall craft like this.
What happens is, children are free to think on their own without adult interference.
Just because kids are given the freedom to begin projects with minimal restriction is exactly what teaches them initiative taking
Their creativity, of course blooms because they are being allowed to create what they like.
Imagine how much of a self esteem booster this is.
If you are an early childhood teacher you may find another interesting crafts project in this style called Fall projects for the preschool classroom.
The difference in what this type of crafts, or as I call it educational arts and crafts does for children is indescribable.
Learn 4 ways to turn holiday crafts with kids into a real learning experience.
When it comes to activities that adults do with kids, crafts is probably at the very top.
Homeschoolers, stay at home moms, early childhood teachers, grandparents
feel that since children usually love pasting and cutting, then crafts is a great way to spend time with each other. This is often done around holiday tiem
As a time filling activity, crafts is one of the best, as children love to mess and glue and color and can do so for long periods of time.
It’s when adults expectations of what young children can actually create in crafts collides with reality, that problems arise. They then feel that the only way children can create crafts is by copying an adults model. I call this “copycat crafts”.
If you are a real traditional sort and have no problem with creating robots out of your children then go right ahead and keep doing these kinds of crafts. There are books and websites that are full of them
and I am sure there will be no difficulty finding tons of crafts online for kids to copy.
First listen, however, to a short explanation of the detriments of copycat crafts. You can also go download a free report that will help you with all kid crafts by explaining to you in detail the pros and cons of copycat crafts and educational crafts.
Robots just follow directions without thinking. So that is what happens to children who don’t think when making projects, but just follow directions. Copycat crafts is detrimental to your children and I would like to explain why that is.
Art should NOT just be to commemorate holidays. It should be an enriching experience for children and they should be gaining all sorts of wonderful skills from it.
Doing crafts the correct way gives children an opportunity to use their brains by solving problems, learning greater independence and developing a greater self esteem.
Fine motor coordination is best honed by doing lots of tradtional arts and crafts is what many will tell you. what they don’t realize though is there are not too many other benefits.
I have a great post for you that gives a great example of creativity in art by showing you how children can make a crafts activity of flowers using both methods.
Why is it then that adults tend to only get busy with crafts around holiday time.
So where do we go from here?
If you like the idea of adding more creativity to kids crafts you can check out Educational arts and crafts which will give you lots of crafts for kids to do that are truly educational.
If you want to try doing educational crafts on your own, however, and not copycat crafts then there 4 points to keep in mind when choosing a crafts for your children.
1. Does this activity allow for any problem solving?
2.Will making this project allow for any thinking skills?
3. Where’s the creativity here?
4.Would a child feel a sense of accomplishment after doing this craft?
If you keep these thoughts in mind when choosing crafts then not only will you be commemorating the holidays and spending quality time with your children but they also will be gaining vital skills