We are parents of a very active, very curious almost two year old. We've been doing crafts with her for a while now, but she is only starting to truly look forward to it. On our website http://www.allkidsnetwork.com/ we mention that a lot of our crafts are toddler friendly because we've been able to do them or at least do parts of them with our daughter. I wanted to compile and share a few of our tricks to help encourage you to create projects with your own little ones.
1. Timing: As a mother/father/caregiver of a toddler, you are already aware that timing is everything. If the craft involves multiple pieces of paper to be glued together, handprints to be cut out, etc. it's best to have this all done ahead of time. Toddlers may think it's fun to have their hands traced, but waiting while mommy cuts out 10 handprints for a turkey gets old really fast!
2. Don't Expect Patience: Toddlers have no patience when it comes to waiting for glue or paint to dry. We recently made a paper plate fish with our daughter. While the body of the fish was drying, we got out some stickers and play foam shapes and made a picture. We also got out some cotton balls and glue to let her play around with different textures, and well, glue! By the time we were done with our side craft the "real" craft was ready to continue with.
3. Crafting is a Time for Learning: Doing crafts with your children is a great way to incorporate teaching into your time together. In addition to fostering your children's creativity, you can also be reinforcing concrete skills. Matching, colors, shapes, animal sounds, and seasonal lessons can all be explained when doing crafts AND your child will love every minute of it! At the same time you are also helping your toddler learn to follow directions and rules.
4. Be Creative With Supplies: If you don't feel like setting up a specific craft and just want to play with paint or glue, toddlers love it when you use different materials. Our daughter thinks it's hysterical to "paint" with dry pasta (fettucini works especially well). We glob some paint on paper and let her drag the pasta through the paint to create lines. Another favorite is using inexpensive match box cars. It's important to have a set car for this though, because once you're done they are pretty much always going to be your "paint cars". Same concept as above - dip the wheels of the car in paint and roll it around on the paper to create roads or patterns. It does take a few passes for this to get going - you need to get the wheels coated well.
5. Know Your Child's Limits: There are simply some crafts that will just frustrate your child. Toddlers tend to do best with crafts that have an identifiable end point (an abstract animal is just confusing to a child trying to understand the world). They also typically do very well with glue based projects - having to glue a few smaller pieces of paper to a large item to create a finished project is perfect.
6. There is No Wrong Way: The first time you do a craft with your toddler and hang it up it's amazing to see the little look of toddler pride that comes over them. I try to make sure that I don't let the type-A side of my personality show through during craft time. She's a toddler learning new skills so correcting every little thing would just be detrimental to the whole process. For example, I made an apple tree craft with my daughter one day and she loved it. We used her finger prints to make the apples and practiced counting them, practiced colors, etc. She was so proud of it and I made sure to praise her for doing a great job as we hung it on the fridge. I love it - the trunk is glued on crooked, the apples a little smeary and one is amazingly suspended in a cloud. When my husband got home, Megan pulled daddy over to the fridge to show him her "apple cree". It was priceless.
7. Have Fun! Crafts are messy - it's part of their appeal! Older children are relatively capable of controlling the amount of mess that they can create, toddlers live for the mess! They are exploring with new materials, new rules, new experiences so it's unrealistic to expect things to be clean and orderly. Our daughter was painting very controlled one day and then decided that she was tired of using her paint brush and switched to using her whole hand! I started saying "wait, your brush" and her little face froze expecting me to correct her. But then I stopped and realized that nothing bad was happening and said " Well, that looks more fun that way! The green paint is squishy isn't it?". She had a blast!
Doing crafts with our baby girl has been a very positive experience for everyone. We try to incorporate a craft time every weekend when we can all be together as a family and I sincerely hope we're able to continue this routine well into the future. We hope this collection of ideas will help you create your own family crafting tradition! If you are looking for a great toddler craft to start on, try our stained glass fish craft. Here are some pictures of our version of this craft:
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