Art and craft are simple works, as simple as making thing that you want to. The hardest part happen when we want to imitate someone else work. Say you want to make a hat that is similar with the hat that was made by knitting expert, but your expertise in knitting is beginner level, you will have to work so very hard to make the hat.

For beginners artist and crafter, I suggest you to do it just for fun, fun, and fun! Yes you have to mastering the skill, but do it in step by step, do not ambitious or you’ll get depressed and therefore art and craft not become fun activities anymore.

I am a crafter. I get money from craft. I also love to painting and drawing for fun. You can see my work in my Instagram. I never force my son to be like me. Therefore my son is less interested in art and craft. I often told him that he must master crafting skills that he can use to improve his own house. And for art, I emphasized that I have fun with my art, art can reduce my stress.

In our homeschooling, I like the thematic-interest based learning. Thematic-interest based learning will deliver knowledge easily because we use our child’s interest to manage learning. Here in remote area where we live, there are ponds that full with lotuses. We seldom saw lotus in city except those deliberately planted by people, and the flowers are in small amount. Those lotuses attracted his attention. So I decided to learn from lotus, the science, social study, included art and craft.

We made our lotus from regular white paper, actually I have washi paper that is best paper to make origami because washi paper does not tear easily, but I left them in our house in Java island, I’m a little sorry for that. After made the lotus origami, we painted the lotus red and the leaves green. You can see that our paper lotuses didn’t white anymore. We had fun in art and craft! I got the lotus paper tutorial from Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw3QCSfNHo0

So why I put art and craft as a way to learn? There are advantages of art and craft:

√ Your child can learn to make something

√ Your child will have self confidence that he can make something, this will led so much creativities in his life.

√ Your child learn to control his motorik. It is important, because some craft tools need good hands and arms control to handle, such as cutter, needles, they will harm you if not careful.

√ Your child learn to use craft tools. The use of ruler, cutter, needles, scissor, iron, brushes, palettes, must be learned in order to use them appropriately.

√ Your child will have ideas of what he need to make something that he wants. If your child is not used to make craft he will not have ideas to make or to fix objects.

You will see how easy to ask children learn art and craft if they are interesting to the object. They will not resist to learn something that interesting to him, whatever the subject you want him to learn: math, language art, foreign language, science, also art and craft! Those are the advantages of thematic-interest based learning.

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