Benefits of Craft Making for Kids
Discover how making crafts helps your children!
Crafts provide fun activities for children, especially during summer breaks from school. Art also enriches a child’s life with many benefits.
Making crafts develops small and gross motor coordination as well as bilateral coordination. In handling paper, coloring supplies, and scissors, children use their eye-hand coordination as well as dexterity or small motor skills. Larger crafts like painting on an easel use their larger muscles.
Art allows kids to create their own designs once they master basic skills and that taps into their imagination.
Children build their confidence and self-esteem naturally as they master skills such as cutting and following direction to create a project.In learning to knit, tie knots, or weave a child learns basic skills and then they apply their ability to create their own designs.
Making crafts with children allows communication about art, color, and design to increase vocabulary and social skills.
Doing projects that involve lots of parts such as making paper beads and then stringing them or using cut out shapes to create a mosaic design helps young ones develop spatial relationships and visual perception.
To open up a packet of cut out parts and put them together to form a design or follow directions helps children increase listening skills, visual discrimination, and sequential memory skills.
Finishing a project and looking at it helps children learn visual closure.
Creating their own art once they develop basic skills lets them apply strategic thinking and fosters self-expression as they choose colors and designs they see in their minds. It’s good to understand how to hold a paint brush and notice what movements result in different strokes. Art is also about the choices of what to paint, what colors to use, and which strokes to apply where. There’s a mix of developing skill and being free to imagine and express oneself.
These are some of the benefits children reap from making crafts. They also develop patience as they wait for glue to dry or colors to set. They learn to persevere on projects that take longer. They also can learn to view failure when things go wrong as part of the process and learning experience.
Foster craft making by providing lots of art supplies and space to work. Cover surfaces with old tablecloths or plastic to protect furniture and floors. Be encouraging to nurture young artists and praise their efforts as well as outcomes. Have a way to display creations such as a wall or shelf to place their work or take photos and fill an album with pictures of their work.
For messier projects, like using glitter, provide containers that can hold the project when glitter is applied. This contains the excess glitter and makes it easier to return the extra to a storage container.
Have some craft books for them to browse and find more projects to do, such as my latest craft book The Super-Sized Book of Bible Craft Gifts. The book includes STEAM lessons to share how math and science relate to art and helps them understand that the world is connected. The 100+ projects encourage children to add kind words to share kindness with friends or express love to family members.