There are a number of great crafts that you can teach kids. Children love to explore their creative sides and work with their hands, experience bright colours, and take advantage of the freedom to be messy and imaginative.

Types of Crafts:

One of the best crafts for kids is finger painting. Most kids enjoy being able to create beautiful, colourful pictures with their hands. Often, finger painting involves allowing kids to create whatever kind of painting they want, without having to conform to certain standards. Just letting the kids paint according to their own whims will reveal some memorable pieces are painted as a result.

Children also like making things out of clay. They enjoy using their hands to make all kinds of shapes. Teachers and parents can use clay to teach children about shapes, for instance, by having the children create circles, squares, and triangle shapes out of the clay. Working with clay also helps children release any negative feelings or emotions they may be experiencing.

Children also love decorating Easter eggs, because this craft involves the use of colours. Kids love dunking the boiled eggs into the water tinted with food colouring and marvelling at the way the eggs change colour. Many children will use their own creative tendencies to make multi-coloured eggs.

Pipe cleaners can be used in a variety of crafts. Pipe cleaners are soft and stretchy and children love touching them and working with them. Making pipe cleaner crafts is an excellent way for teachers to educate children about many subjects. One of the most popular examples of pipe cleaner crafts is to make pipe cleaner animals, which can provide an opening for teachers to start a lesson about the kinds of animals that live on a farm, or in the zoo, for instance.

One of the most popular children’s crafts is any craft using dried macaroni pasta. There are all sorts of crafts that children can do that use this kind of pasta. One of these is to make a macaroni necklace by stringing the pasta on a string. But children can dress this necklace up by painting the pasta different colours. They can also create macaroni pictures by gluing coloured macaroni on paper. Children can easily make pictures of smiley faces, or even rainbows, or whatever image comes to their mind.

Benefits of Crafts:

Because these kinds of crafts require a number of different skills of children, these and other crafts are beneficial to a child’s brain development. Arts and crafts help children develop their visual and tactile skills. It has been proven that these types of activities make the synapses between brain cells stronger. The arts in general open up the neural networks within the brain, in addition to strengthening the existing neural pathways, and these crafts are no exception. As a result of enjoying crafts and participating in the arts, children can become better at problem-solving.

Crafts designed especially for kids not only help children cognitively and developmentally, but they also tend to inspire children to be more imaginative. The more they see that their creativity is welcomed and encouraged, the more likely they are to express it. Crafts can improve and stimulate a child’s self-esteem, as well. When a child creates something of his own from scratch, he or she often feels a sense of pride and accomplishment. When they feel good about their abilities and get to see firsthand what their skills are, they are more likely to feel valued and confident.

Author Bio: Jenny Talorman is an amateur writer with a special interest in education, young development and educating others on a range of topics which include; education, the role of children’s crafts and games in development, young peoples’ issues and even baking.

Category: Arts and Crafts
Keywords: crafts, children\’s crafts, children\’s toys, toys, play