Art and crafting activities can get messy especially when kids are involved. However, the benefits of allowing children how to create with their hands outweigh the amount of clean-up that parents are left to deal with at the end of the activity.
Considering the amount of time our children spend indoors these days, having creative activities that you can do at home will serve you well, especially when the children’s routine starts to feel monotonous.
That said, here are three creative activities that children can enjoy while learning something new with you at home:
Crafting
Children love to do arts and crafts; they can spend hours hunched on a table working with their hands, doing something very enjoyable to them. When children use their hands and fingers to manipulate art materials and build with their hands, they are tapping into their fine motor skills, and they are developing these skills as they work.
To mimic the way arts and crafts are done in schools, parents can order high-quality monthly craft kits — great for both children and adults — that contain materials and supplies that are different for each month. Aside from that, it’s a great opportunity for parents to spend time with their kids while teaching them.
What’s good about these craft box subscription is that every box comes with a set of instructions and even have video tutorials that you can follow with your children. These make crafting much easier and more fun for both you and your kids, or the whole family!
Above all, craft projects are very practical; you can actually use the finished product, like cards and bags to name a few. These two also go perfectly together, especially now when we stay in touch with family, relatives, friends by sending them gifts and packages to make up for the lack of face time, due to the current situation.
Handwriting
Here’s another art that is threatened by the lack of use for it. Owing to the rise of digital and touch-type technology, many of us, our children included, rarely pick up a pen to write something down.
Handwriting is becoming a lost art and many of the young ones are unfamiliar with the terms cursive, calligraphy, and block letters. But there is more to handwriting than what we give it credit for: writing with our hands improves our memory and helps us put our ideas into words better.
Aside from that, handwritten notes, especially letters, hold sentimental value. A person’s handwriting is proof of their existence, a means to translate their thoughts into words, and a way to send a message across.
There are practice sheets designed to help the user learn the techniques of script, cursive, and block letter handwriting. These guides make it easy for the learner to adapt the writing techniques mentioned above and gain a skill that they will be able to use for the rest of their lives.
In this digital age, something as basic as practicing handwriting is a wonderful thing we can teach our children and will be one of the things that they’ll look back on fondly when they get older.
Painting
Like the first two examples mentioned above, painting helps children develop their fine motor and sensory development, learn colors, and feel comfortable and confident in expressing their ideas through creativity.
Learning creative skills are often perceived as less necessary compared to learning academic subjects, yet creative skills are the ones that set children apart. It not only boosts their confidence but also gives them something to be proud of.
Painting develops understated yet very important skills: anatomy, composition, edges, lighting, perspective, and proportions.
And while it doesn’t seem immediately critical in the workplace, your children will surely benefit from learning all these skills, which can be developed by learning how to paint.
As you can see, your children can hugely benefit from learning things by working with their hands. But on top of that, these are activities that you can do with your children and a great way to spend time with them.
These activities serve as a way for you to promote child development at home, on top of their school learning. It also provides your kids a great alternative for screen time and helps them reduce the typical amount of time they spend in front of their gadgets.
While there is nothing wrong with using technology and making part of our daily lives, sometimes going back to the basics is what we need to level up our skills and learn new things that can make us and our children proud and happy about ourselves.
