Private time with your children and crafts for Thanksgiviing; the perfect match. At the same time you will be giving them some fun, enriching art activities,.

One of the negative aspects of lots of the tradtional crafts done with kids is the copycat mode they are in. A common, old fashioned way of doing crafts projects is the traditional way of following and adults model.

As such creativity is removed from the activity which in turn removes possibilites for thinking, problem solving skills and developing a good self esteem.

By doing Educational Arts and Crafts the children are having lots of their skills worked on. Problem solving, creativity and self esteem are some some of the many benefits.

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.

One of the most fun categories 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 style of Educational Crafts, cafeteria style, is one that children love. They get some sort of template or base to create a particular project and then are given an array of materials to decorate or create the project, which makes them very individual.

It is so important to give choices to the children when doing art as it adds a variety of skills to their cognitive development.

The decision of which materials to use will be the childres’s as well as how to use those materials to create the craft.This encourages initiaitive takiing and independence.

When difficult problems come up, they need fo figure out how to solve them. Should they cut up this one large piece of collage material into many smaller pieces or should they attempt to fit the large one onto the space they have available.

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.

A wonderful instrument to make for your own recreation of an Indian tribal pow-wow would be drums.

Step #1

Give the children an empty container large enough to use as a drum.

Empty oatmeal containers are really ideal, but any other large enough cylinder like empty coffee containers work as well.

Step #2

Give the children a few choices of paper and materials to have the container covered,. Even though its more idea to have more choices, if construction paper is the only paper of choice to cover, then just add more 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

Decoration of the drums can be done by choosing from an array of materials that you prepare for the kids. 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.

If you look closely at the way different age children work, you will notice how the young ones put down materials indiscriminately while older children deliberate more before pasting.

Before the glue is even dried you can start covering up the tops of the drums.

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. (adds a touch of home made, Indian quality to it)

Have your own Indian pow-wow by having the children use their palms or sticks on the drums.

This is only one way of using the cafeteria style in making art with children.

If you’d 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.