Crafting With Your Kids

Being a parent is not only about keeping them safe and healthy, it’s also about helping them develop creative thoughts and ideas and teaching them life lessons and how to be a better person. Sounds like quite the job. But, if you want a simple way to bond with your children while allowing them to be creative and stealthily teaching them, crafts are a good option. Doing arts and crafts with your children can also help build their confidence, develop higher thinking skills, and gives you the ability to interact with them via different learning styles and subjects such as math, reading, literature and spelling.

1. Creativity - Just by giving a child a blank canvas and some crayons or markers, you are introducing them to the endless possibilities that creativity creates. Through the years, you might be surprise at what a progression your child made--from fortuitous scribbles to purposeful strokes in his artwork. Arts and crafts are not only fun, but they also help teach children to be unique and innovative and that it's okay to be unique. In addition, letting children experiment with creative crafts will help them become creative problem solvers in the adolescent and adult stages.
2. Motor Skills and Coordination - The first time you put a crayon in a child’s hand, you are taking the first step to improve motor skills and coordination. Take this up a notch and include a higher level of development in more advanced projects like building a bird house, painting a landscape or anything else that involves hand eye coordination. Motor skills and coordination help later on in life, from learning to tie their own shoe to playing sports in school.
3. Team Work vs Independence - Because arts and crafts projects are so versatile, you can teach your children to work well with others as well as let them work independently. This will reiterate the idea that it's important to be both a team member on a project and work just as well alone. Of course, this will be immensely helpful during their school years and once they begin to work in the real world. This also helps them realize that while teamwork is important, they can do things on their own as well.
4. Following Directions - Crafting is a great way to get kids to realize that paying attention to details and following directions is often going to get them closer to their goal. When creating a project, if your child decides not to pay attention to the details and instructions, he'll realize that his end project may look nothing like yours. Not following directions can have consequences.
5. Conversations - Sitting down and creating a project with your child will allow you to have one-on-one time with him and thus, let him practice his conversation skills. Whether talking about the project itself or about his day, he'll learn how to pay attention to what's being said and how to respond accordingly--a very valuable skill to build upon especially during his school age years. In addition, this special time with your child will forge a stronger bond between the two of you (or between the family if the whole family participates in crafting). This time can really be used to talk about important issues that may be presenting itself.

Setting time aside to craft with your kids can have many positive effects from simply creating that much needed one-on-one time between family members to supplying them with the skills they'll need to be a successful adult.