Do you have a child who loves to be crafty? Young children in general love doing arts and crafts. While its good to provide structured crafts with our kids, too many of the crafts we do with children prevent them from further exploring their creativity. In addition to the crafts you are already doing with your child, it’s important that they also explore creativity on their own.
If you have a child who is old enough to be trusted to use scissors and glue on their own, consider creating a crafting container for them. Leave it out where they can have access to it whenever the desire to create arises. Items to include in the container would include not only the expected glue sticks and scissors but also items from around the house as well. Buttons, paperclips, rubber bands and coins are a great addition to a crafting container. Other items to add: papers of different texture and pattern, pipe cleaners, googly eyes, ribbon, dried beans, different shaped pasta, popsicle sticks, felt, foam and string. Also provide plenty of plain paper and construction paper, markers, crayons and colored pencils.
My son had an interest in castles at one point. One day, he asked me to help him make a fun picture of a castle. We used items from around the house, including pipe cleaners to make a catapult, pennies for windows, and paper clips for the portcullis. Providing a crafting container makes the crafting opportunities endless for your children. Happy crafting!
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Great ideas! Encouraging creativity can be paramount during struggles too. When my husband was laid off last year, our oldest daughter, who was 11 at the time, had a really difficult time coping. She loves to write, so as part of her schoolwork, I had her finish up a book she’d been writing, working hard at making it a complete story. I’d “edit”, giving her suggestions about where to expand, grammatical corrections, etc. We then had it proofread and had it published via Createspace at Amazon. She now is a professional author of a fiction book about horses (search Maddie Blank on Amazon if you’re interested)! This process really helped her to use her creative gifts to work through the stress she was experiencing in a positive way. Encouraging creativity in our kids can help them in more ways than you can imagine!
Amen to creativity. I use it often with the teens I work with, or those I visit in prison/hospitals. Our busy lives often keep us so occupied, it takes a forced retreat sometimes to remind our right brain to function.