The right craft ideas can turn regular school days into great days, for you and your students.
But it’s critical that you come up with craft ideas that inspire. Every teacher knows what the following dreaded scenario feels like: You introduce a new craft idea to your classroom, eager for them to come to life with excitement, but all you get are shrugs of indifference.
Today, the goal is to inspire you so you can inspire your students and keep them pumped for craft time. So let’s dig out those measuring tools and see if we can’t keep craft time from feeling like nap time.
What follows is a list of craft ideas to keep your class humming along.
Bring in Outside Inspiration
This idea takes a bit of extra planning. On top of that, it may require you to devote a little extra one-on-one time to your little artists as they work. But it’s all worth it because this idea helps breathe art into their lives outside craft time.
First off, you start with a little homework assignment. You ask your students to go out into the world on the hunt for one especially interesting or beautiful item. They can then bring that actual item into class, or they can simply bring in a photo of it. You can get by with a simple thorough description of the item, too.
And then, you simply have each of your students sketch the item and give it a real artistic flourish with watercolors.
When it comes down to it, the art itself is your basic classroom stuff. But you’re asking them to go out into the world with an artist’s eye, and that’s what makes this special and oh-so-fun.
Fantastical Sea Creatures
One of the greatest things you can instill in your junior artists is a desire to look beyond the day to day and see the world as one rife with creative potential.
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That’s what we are trying to achieve with this craft, which encourages students to invent their own sea creatures. To get their creative juices flowing, you should start with a primer on all the wonders of the deep sea. If you’re able to show YouTube videos in class, there’s no doubt this deep dive on the deep sea for kids will turbocharge your students’ creative juices.
Get a class discussion going about all the incredible animals and ask them to invent something special of their own. Then, you can get to crafting. Your students can use watercolors to paint their fantastical creatures, or you can bring out the construction paper and have them assemble their made up animals bit by bit. If you go the construction route, be ready with craft scissors and a cutting mat.
The goal is not to create scary sea monsters, though if some students want to go the monster route, that’s just fine.
Story Time Art
Kids love story time. Every teacher knows that. Even the rowdiest kids in your classroom tend to settle down when a good yarn is underway. Here, we are striving to build upon that inventiveness to story by pairing it with craft time. This approach will have your already-rapt kids listening closer than ever before.
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Here’s how this craft should go down: Before reading your kids a story (and this should be a book with elaborate visuals), tell them that you are going to then create pieces of art based on the book itself. They can create specific characters from the book or entire scenes.
Afterwards, you should encourage your students to share their work and talk about why they chose to highlight that specific component from the book.
Art for Each Other
Kids can be a little bit selfish. That doesn’t make them crummy little monsters. It’s just natural to be especially inward focused when you’re a kid. This craft idea encourages kids to really pay attention to their classmates and then create little pieces of art for them.
Here, you’ll once again encourage your students to look for beauty and creativity beyond the classroom. But now, instead of using that inspiration to create pieces of art for themselves, they’ll instead share what they have in mind with a fellow classmate, who will then turn that into a bit of art.
It should go down in a manner along these lines: You’ll pair students up and ask them to, one at a time, share their little bit of outside inspiration with their classmate. After they both share their stories with each other, all the students will then use what their craft partner just described to create a piece of wholly unique art. When they are done, they’ll gift that craft to their partner.
This is an especially useful craft. It teaches selflessness, listening skills, sharing and it keeps those creative juices flowing!
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