Wednesday, March 08, 2006
March is National Crafts Month…
March seems to be the National Month for nearly everything…
What’s the difference between Arts and Crafts? The process of making art and the process of making crafts are related but different activities. Many people think of 'arts & crafts' as if they were really one process. However, practice with making a painting and making a birdhouse show us that arts and crafts are really quite different activities. While art is an open ended or 'unstructured' activity, crafts are goal oriented or 'structured.' In the above example, painting is an art activity and a birdhouse is a craft activity. A good arts & crafts program provides both art and craft activities, and allows children to experiment and learn from both.
Craft Activities Are:
· Structured Projects with a Pre-Determined Goal
· Project Oriented Activities with a Clear Beginning, Middle & End
· Involve Assembly of 3-dimensional materials which are then decorated
· Require Specific Materials
Art activities develop creativity while craft activities develop thinking skills. So let’s celebrate National Craft Month by promoting some thinking skills with our children.
Many of my favorite craft resources have been listed in the past, but I will give you them again:
March seems to be the National Month for nearly everything…
What’s the difference between Arts and Crafts? The process of making art and the process of making crafts are related but different activities. Many people think of 'arts & crafts' as if they were really one process. However, practice with making a painting and making a birdhouse show us that arts and crafts are really quite different activities. While art is an open ended or 'unstructured' activity, crafts are goal oriented or 'structured.' In the above example, painting is an art activity and a birdhouse is a craft activity. A good arts & crafts program provides both art and craft activities, and allows children to experiment and learn from both.
Craft Activities Are:
· Structured Projects with a Pre-Determined Goal
· Project Oriented Activities with a Clear Beginning, Middle & End
· Involve Assembly of 3-dimensional materials which are then decorated
· Require Specific Materials
Art activities develop creativity while craft activities develop thinking skills. So let’s celebrate National Craft Month by promoting some thinking skills with our children.
Many of my favorite craft resources have been listed in the past, but I will give you them again:
- Crayola Kids This site is about more than just crayons, you can access multimedia craft ideas from Alphabet to Zoogles. This is one of the best.
- DLTK Kids is a top notch craft site that can provide all the craft ideas that you could ever use. The site specializes in printable crafts such as cut, color, and glue projects, but contain many more ideas.
- Enchanted Learning has literally thousands of craft ideas and example.
- Kids Domain is a slick site with tons of printables, crafts, and activity ideas to do.
- KinderArt ® is the largest collection of free art lessons on the Internet. What began in 1997 as a few helpful ideas for teachers and parents, has since grown into an enormous collection of resources featuring thousands of free lesson plans, ideas and resources.
- Crafts For Kids, The Idea Box, Family Crafts, KinderPlanet, and ChildFun all have some fun things to do.
- Lots more craft resources listed on CLN "Theme Pages" which focus on specific topics within Arts and Crafts. CLN's theme pages are collections of useful Internet educational resources within a narrow curricular topic and contain links curricular resources (information, content...) to help them learn about this topic and links to instructional materials (lesson plans) which will help teachers provide instruction in this theme.
Still don’t have enough? I have lots of crafts sites listed on my website in the Resources section.
// posted by Tammy Wachter @ 7:17 PM 
