Kid’s Crafts For Holidays

Easter is coming up which got me thinking about how I am going to keep my kids occupied this year.

The easiest of kid crafts involves scissors, construction paper, crayons and a bit of tape or blue. It is most fun to theme the craft holiday or special event that is coming up which at the date of writing this would be Easter. You can also purchase crafts kits for kids that involve weaving, sewing, rug hooking, quilting, wood-working, embroidery, and much more.

A great Easter kids craft for Easter is to make bunny headgear. All you need to do is to buy several headbands and then have your children cut out the Easter rabbit ears out of stiff cardboard.

Another good Easter project is to decorate hard boiled eggs. You can decorate them so they look like lambs by adding cotton batten. You can also decorate them so the look likes Easter Chicks. You can also make an egg creature or egg people.

I really enjoy making things with my kids for Halloween. Halloween is a favourite holiday. Good crafts are pumpkin and squash carving. You can crate scary faces and construct bats, ghosts and other spooky creatures out of paper and fabric.

It's also a lot of fun to create your own Christmas tree decorations. If the children are old enough to handle sharp objects you can buy Styrofoam balls, pins and collared beads and have the children stick these beaded pins into the ball. Cover the ball entirely and you have a very attractive Christmas decoration (and personalized gift.

I also roll glass or aluminum balls in glitter or sequins. First trace out the design I want on the side of the ball in glue. Then after creating Christmas themed shapes in glue on the side of the ornament. Traditional Christmas kids crafts also include decorating the Christmas stocking with glitter Older children can be taught to embroider on Christmas stockings using needle and thereads.

There are several kinds of Mother’s day and Valentine’s day kids crafts, but I like dying flowers with my kids for either of these projects. All you do is take a flower (a pure white flower produces the most extreme results), cut off the end of the stems and soak the bottom of the stem in a jar of food coloring. The flowers will soak up the food coloring and tint the petals the color of the food dye. This takes about a day.

Homemade bookmarks and cards also make great Mother’s day and Valentine’s Day kid crafts. Photographs of the kids, pasted on the front of the homemade card personalize this homemade and heartfelt gift.

You can also purchase kids craft kits intended to create everything from felt projects, embroidery, tapestries, baskets, knitted creations, woven fabric, wood projects and dangling mobiles.

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The New Edu-tainment

I was trying to figure out how my child knows so much about the bible lately and it turns out her teacher has been using the Animated Kids Bible in the Classroom. Basically the kids watch a DVD inserted into a player and it is projected right in the classroom.

This works well because most kids, whether they are five or fifteen years old seem to be hypnotized by any type of television or movie screen. Audio visual aids make them as quiet as the television odes at home. Guess the teacher figured out that kids are likely to be very attentive to any type of subject matter once animation is involved.

The use of sophisticated animation is already being used to teach future doctors biology and human anatomy but of course it also has other applications when it comes to helping simplify concepts and also repeating those concepts through the use of a playback function on the DVD player. I notice that my kids watch the same thing again and again and don't mind rewinding. This is of course the rote way to learn.

Some animators and teachers are now referring to learning materials that bridge the gap between entertainment and education as 'edutainment.' My kids are watching this new Animated Kid's Bible series at school definitely falls into this new and unique category of digital media. This is because children (and adults too!) are so enraptured with the novelty of 3D CGI (three dimensional computer generated images. My kids told me that there is nothing that looks so real and they are right!

This type of animation is so detailed and so refined that many people watching the Kid's Animated Bible will find themselves transported to an alternate world where they can watch the creation of women from Adam's Rib, Moses come down the mountain and smash the tablets and the seven plagues of Egypt and also The Birth of Christ.

Some educators are reluctant to use animations as teaching tools but it is because they have yet to realize the medium's full potential to help children retain what they are watching and learning. The idea is to convince students that watching this video is not just an escape route from reality but rather a story that they will be quizzed on after the presentation.

It is handy for a DVD to be paused, replayed or played forward. This allows the teacher to create on the spot quizzes about what might happen next. The pause functions also allow students to take notes while they are watching the stories being told in the Kid's Animation Bible. The secret is to let your student's know that even though they are watching an incredible piece of 3D animation that they are still supposed to be learning and retaining everything that are being taught.

Sunday school teachings were never easier!

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