Invitation to Play with Nature
If the first time you let your children have self-led, unstructured craft play and it fails to showcase their creativity, don’t worry, you may have just missed something important.
My five year old loves nature and regularly asks to make nature craft but I tend use more structured activities when we do this, which I’m not proud of. This time I was going to let her (and her sisters) make their own masterpieces without my instruction and I was excited about the process.
We collected nature together and I lay it all out on a table with a few other must-haves like glue and cardboard pieces. All three of them were really getting into the activity and I couldn’t wait to see their creations. They all came to show me what they’d made and the outcome… was disappointing. All three of them had stuck pieces of nature onto some cardboard, an activity we’d done before.
I thought that if I provided the materials and gave them free space to think creatively then it would just somehow shine though. I learnt that perhaps there’s more to child-led experiences and enhancing creativity in art than I first thought.
It didn’t take me long to figure out how to get my children thinking more creatively and the best part was that I didn’t have to say a word!
ABOUT PENNY: Penny is the creator of Mother Natured, a site designed to help parents build and strengthen their children’s love of nature and wildlife through simple, fun activities.
A mother to three girls, she also works part time as a wildlife education officer. Penny holds a Bachelor of Applied Science – Wildlife Biology and a Graduate Diploma of Education (Early Years). In what little spare time she has left, Penny loves to read, go camping and be out in nature with her family.
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