Crafting Tips for & from #NotACraftyMom

 

Craftwork is a big part of children’s learning activities. Some of them need a little push, most of them are good at it, and all of them have creativity within.. even if it gets expressed in different forms.

 

There are numerous emotional and cognitive benefits of crafting from basic colour recognition to numeracy, developing gross & fine motor skills, decision making & critical thinking. It’s a seemingly endless list and it’s no wonder that most professionals working with children rely on crafts as a staple activity. Educators at schools, daycare curriculums, trained nannies, all know how to challenge kids’ creative juices with age-appropriate craftwork.

 

But what happens when a global pandemic comes along, and all that the poor littles have access to is your standard-issue #NotACraftyMom? If you’re like me and are less inclined towards the art of crafting, then watching all these wonder-moms putting out daily activities can be quite daunting! Thankfully, I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks along the way that have reduced my stress to more manageable levels…

 

You will need:

1 interested and active child

A box of random trinkets and things – collected or store-bought

Paper, used cartons, scissors glue etc.

YouTube & Pinterest, as your new best friends!

 

Step 1: Know the keywords – you don’t need to have a master’s degree in SEO to analyze how to find good content. But when it comes to crafting ideas, remember there are some essentials that need to be added to any activity you want to find. “Easy DIY” and “Quick” are words that come to the rescue quite often. Pro-tip: avoid the misleading “5-minute craft” trap as some of those ideas require hours (or years!) or pre-work for the final activity to be dismissed summarily by the toddler in less than 5 seconds.

Also, be sure to enter your child’s approximate age. Searching for “DIY captain America shield” for instance will lead you to a cosplay expert who is using blowtorches and a power saw to create a realistic-looking shiny shield which may even have been used by Chris Evans in the first Avengers movie for all I can tell. But “Easy DIY captain America shield for 4-year-old” will show you how to paint a paper plate, and add a straw as a handle.  This is something we can do.

 

Step 2: Watch and learn – There are people who have made the effort to put up tutorials for a zillion projects online. Let’s give them some views and make our lives a wee bit easier! But before promising a to-scale-model of the entire village in which a little pig lives with her family (including the dinosaur pet), be sure to watch the video on fast forward mode. There are things that sound fantastic and look fantastic on the beautifully edited content created by regular crafters. But regular crafters also have tools to help them, from the kind of paper or foam or boards they use to the cutters and stickers and little sewing implements. I remember once promising an easy sounding set of puppets to my son, only to find halfway through the video that it requires a specific type of twisty clip-thingy without which the “puppet” is basically a cutout of a stick figure drawing!

 

Step 3: Lose the need for perfection – One activity that my son was very keen on was to make a submersible, and the lady in the video had a beautifully painted blue & yellow little end product. For some reason, he did not want to use paint for this activity – he wanted to use his crayons. So, we need up making a crayon streaked piece, with parts of the brown cardboard still showing! He loved his little rainbow submarine. Even though it looked nothing like the one in the tutorial we were watching. I could’ve offered him pre-painted parts so that the final piece looked a little more “perfect”, but then I realized that even though the crayons were too light to cover up most of the underlying paper, they were bright enough for him. And that’s more important than having an “instagrammable” end product.

 

Step 4: Resist the urge to share (socially). Don’t fall into the trap of needing to document every creation because not everything your child creates will be a masterpiece. Sure, we celebrate some awesome achievements (and show-off a bit), but most of the time, just learn to enjoy the process and the end product. Rather than trying to find the perfect light to take that photo for the grid, let your child decide how to create, and even what to do with the end creation.
Sometimes, no amount of photoshop and portrait mode can pretty up a triangle-shaped car with glitter wheels and spider-masked shaped windows. That’s okay.
And sometimes, your carefully measured out and tediously put together dollhouse with miniature furniture will be ignored or (worse) scribbled upon with permanent marker eyes & a mouth. And that’s okay too.

 

 

 

And most importantly, remember always that your job is to allow for creativity to flourish, not to create it. So don’t worry if you haven’t as much as glued together an envelope before your child was born, even us non-crafty folk can appreciate the creativity and imagination that a child can bring to the table (no pun intended!)

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This post is part of a blog hop hosted by Prisha Lalwani of Mummasaurus.com – Let’s Blog with Pri Season 2.

Do hop on to the train and read what my fellow bloggers Cindy (Blogaberry Foo) and Disha (Life, My Way) are writing about. 

Hosted By :
Prisha Lalwani Mummasaurus.com
IG: @mummasauruss
FB: /mummasaurus1

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