When the occupational therapist told me that my son should do one craft project a week, at least, my heart sank. I'm no artist. In fact, I'm the opposite of artist. I'd never really got into crafts before because I had no talent for it, and my son had no interest.
What, really, was the point of doing an activity if he was only going to keep to it for five minutes or maybe ten minutes, a week?
Now I know. Sure my efforts are rubbish, but I'm astounded at what my son can do and the ideas he will come up with. The use of colours, or design. He still doesn't keep focussed on it for any longer than 10 minutes. But those are 10 minutes that we spend together, and in which he can do a bit of experimenting. And we'd never have had those ten minutes before. So, I no longer view this as a waste of time.
Today my son is off on his Year One school trip to the zoo. All last week they were studying penguins. Most exciting of all was a video they watched in class all about the Emperor Penguin. I had this re-enacted in its entirety at home.
My plans for our craft project this week had involved silver foil and outer space. I had big plans for making our own 'space suits', and making some planets.
As is often the case with kids that all went out of the window. Pouncing on the roll of silver wrapping foil with glee, my son set about making his own ice world. Silver is in fact surprisingly good for an icy landscape. This is the end result. It is all my son's ideas, he led this craft project entirely. Mummy was only there to help make the ideas a reality when it got a bit beyond his abilities.
Like using scissors, which he still hasn't developed enough strength in his fingers to do properly. But, we're working on that!
For this project we used a roll of silver wrapping foil, some felt tips, scissors, the little plastic containers you get from inside Kinder eggs, a bit of blu tac and sticky tape, and a whole lot of imagination.
Give it a try. Hand your child a roll of silver foil and some materials and see what they come up with. Can you guess though which of the 'penquins' mummy made?
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