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. Having a crafts project done by the kids without following the adults model makes children feel capable and good about themselves.
Creativity is another great advantage educational arts and crafts has over other forms of arts and crafts.
A child’s own creativity is greatly restrained when she has to copy an adults idea of what a craft should look like.
Educational art has a number of parts to it that include lots of activities.
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.
I have delineated below, two very low cost and simple crafts to do with your kids for your Christmas tree.
The first one uses plastic throwaway cups:
You will need to offer the children an array of colorful, permanent markers so they can color all over their cups. Encourage them to wrok slowly and use lots of markers on the whole 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. Give them a few minutes so that they have time to melt. Keep an eye on them so they don’t disintegrate in the oven. The cups and the tray of course, get very hot so the children must be kept away until they cool.
When they are cool, make a hole in the center and use colorful ribbon to hang as an ornament for your tree.
Another item that is easy to find in the home will be the next activity and uses old or discarded cd’s.
What next? Let the kids decorate them and have them string them up with ribbon or yarn.
There so many methods of beautifying 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