Can We Talk 2

Crafts for kids

         I'm helping crafts at Music Camp this week. The thrust of it is to learn a musical and present it tomorrow night. But they also have snacks, recreation, and crafts.

         Two people have been doing props, separately, not together. Preschoolers are one group not in the musical, so they get to go home at noon. Kindergarten thru second grade are also dismissed early. They have their own music and classes.

         So I am working with 3rd through 6th with a few older kids doing solos. Some of the crafts we have done I thought would not go over with that age group. The easier they were, the more they liked them. They really got into making party hats of paper plates with half a Styrofoam ball hot glued on it. They chose their own lace, rickrack, pompoms and artificial flowers and used tacky glue to attach. They were so creative! One active boy made a Martian hat with the stems only from the flowers with pompoms for eyes.

         Only one kid balked at wearing the hat, a girl. I assured her it was for decoration only. No one would ever see her wearing it. Some are worthy of hanging on a wall. Other days, we let them draw design we had chosen for them to imitate and decorate as they chose with markers. One day we made bookworms, since there is one in the play. Those took a lot of patience and ended up with pipe cleaner antennae and googly eyes. Today we did water colors on a pre-chosen design which they had to imitate. We ran out of time. They really got into it.

         I was surprised, thinking they wouldn't like things so simple and maybe childish. But maybe 8-12 year olds are all that sophisticated yet.