Those words came out of my mouth to a branch library manager. Earlier this month, right before I was to fill in for the full-time librarian who was on vacation. The manager looked a bit stunned. I had noticed two tables covered with large sheets of white paper in the meeting room where I was to share stories and songs with a group of preschoolers. I didn’t want to assume the paper was for the children who would be with me, but I thought we could have fun drawing pictures of things that begin with the letter F and writing the letter F all over it. I had selected several stories about friends, and I think F makes one of the funniest sounds.
When she said, “It’s for the craft. To protect the tables from the mess,” I just blurted out, “Oh, I don’t do crafts.” I quickly added, “I would love to have the kids write and draw on it though.” She found the markers for me.
That incident happened well over a week ago, but I have been haunted by my pointed statement of the not-doing of crafts. I have done crafts with children while employed as a full-time librarian but I rarely do them in a 1/2 hour storytime geared for preschoolers. Why is that?
So often, in my experience, a craft project is a detailed instruction about how to make an end product. Many skills are required and practiced in making a craft. Important skills. However, as a child, I never found I had enough time to do the craft the way I wanted to do it, the way the sample looked. As a mother, I have found that my young son spends less than two minutes of the time on the craft, preferring to make the craft materials talk to each other.
Maybe I should offer more opportunities for craft-making so young children can experiment and create with different materials, to allow variations on a theme, to start with an idea and let the children interpret that idea. Maybe it would encourage those children, the ones who, like me, might get stuck on what the end product is supposed to look like, that it’s o.k. to let go a bit. Maybe it’s a reminder that a conversation between cotton balls and glue can be about friends and fun.
Tina
I can understand not doing a craft for a 1/2 hour story time due to time constraints– when I taught preschool morning camp, I found that it took about 15 minutes for the children to do a craft justice, if the children had the fine motor skills and attention abilities to do the craft. One really fun activity that I would like to share is to get the children to decorate (cotton balls, sequins, stickers etc.) construction paper hats, and then have them wear their creations while reading a hat related book, or saying the rhyme “Yankee Doodle” (and getting them to ride imaginary horses)!
Teresa Walls Post author
Thanks for your comment, Tina. Decorating a piece of construction paper in whatever way a child pleases is a great way for me to include a craft. I need to loosen up my concept of “craft.”