Art For Thanksgiving Can be Enriching and Educational if Done Correctly
Using special crafts time to make Thanksgiving crafts with your kids, is one of the best ways you can spend time with children. It’s very interactive and they are gaining so many skills from the art itself.
A difficulty with lots of the crafts that are done is that they are done in copycat mode. When children are doing crafts where they are following and adults model, that is tradtional arts and crafts.
This removes all creativity from the activity, allows for no thinking and problem solving skills, thereby reducing the possibility of gaining real self respect and self esteem.
On the other hand, Educational Arts and Crafts brings out the best in children. It gives them thinking and problem solving opportunities, makes their creative juices flow and adds to their self esteem.
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.
A category of Education crafts is called cafeteria style. 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”.
This particular category of Educational Crafts, cafeteria style, is one that is great for various developmental levels. While each child gets the same base or template for the projects, they each get to create the project according to where they are developmentally with a large amount of materials available to them to decorate with.
It is so important to give choices to the children when doing art as it adds a variety of skills to their cognitive development.
It is from a large selection of materials that the children pick the materials they want to use and then make their craft with what they chose.This encourages initiaitive takiing and independence.
They consequently must decide how the many problems that crop up can be solved. Is the piece they chose long enough or or do they need to cut it down to a smaller size.
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.
Indian instruments are great crafts activities to make and drums would probably be one of the easiest.
Step #1
You may want to look around for cylinder containers for the drums. Make sure they are empty.
Empty oatmeal containers are really ideal, but any other large enough cylinder like empty coffee containers work as well.
Step #2
You can use a wide assortment of papers and materials to offer the children to cover their containers. If all you have is construction paper, at least make sure you have alot of colors to choose from.
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
There is a plethora of art materials to give children to use in decorating their drums but you don’t have to give them every single item, give an amount suitable for that age group. 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.
Younger children don’t pay much attention to how they are decorating their projects while older children put alot of thought into the process.
Now that the drums are all decorated, they need to be finished by covering up.
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. (that actually makes it look more like a drum)
Some kids may want to use sticks, others may just want to use their palms for 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.
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