The Benefits of Arts and Crafts Explained for Students in ECA Courses
June 21, 2019
Arts and crafts are not only a fun pastime for children—they help develop multiple skills, give children a leg up on their schoolwork, and assist them with their emotions. As an early childcare assistant you can use arts and crafts, under a teacher’s leadership, to further a child’s experience and development. When collaborating with teachers to plan daily activities, keep in mind that a little paint and glitter glue can work wonders for the next generation.
Read on to learn a little more about what cutting, pasting, constructing, and designing can bring to your career, and how you can use these activities to make a difference.
With an Early Childcare Assistant Diploma, You Can Use Art to Develop Fine Motor Skills
Fine motor skills are important for daily tasks that children are faced with—you will surely notice this when assisting with buttoning or zippering as they dress for outdoors, or when they are feeding themselves at lunchtime. Arts and crafts are a great way to develop fine motor skills, requiring children to cut or colour within lines, stick parts together, or trace drawings. Even holding tools like paintbrushes or scissors develops these skills, which are transferable to their daily routines.
Using tools like scissors helps children develop fine motor skills
Children also need to have good visual processing, to help with their hand-eye coordination, memorization, and perception of the environment around them. With an early childcare assistant diploma, you can engage children’s visual skills in a fun way, letting them use what they see to create something from their imagination. This both empowers them and gives them experience working with different colours, shapes, concepts, and spatial relations.
Encourage Children to Make Decisions after ECA Courses with the Help of Arts and Crafts
The ability to analyze a situation and solve problems will arm children for the rest of their lives with critical thinking and decision-making skills. After your ECA courses, you can use arts and crafts as an opportunity to help foster these skills. If you are assisting a child with their masterpiece, you can encourage them to make choices. The child has the opportunity to choose materials and colours, and plan out construction. The child may also encounter a problem, such as a particular item not sticking to their creation properly, and need to think of a solution. It’s a great opportunity for them to overcome obstacles and find new solutions, helping to build important life skills.
Crafting Helps Children Grow Emotionally and Socially
Giving children freedom to be creative and make their own choices with a variety of textures, colours, and materials when crafting will often reveal their emotions. Sometimes, early childcare assistants will communicate with children by asking why they made different choices with their artwork. This allows them to connect what they’ve made to their current mental state, with a safe invitation to express everything. Instead of controlling how the final product looks or what the end result is of each choice, giving the child space to explore and express will encourage them to push to the full range of their own development.
Talking to children about their creations helps them work through emotions
Teamwork and social skills are another important area of a child’s life that can be built upon with arts and crafts. Communicating with a child as you help them during craft time improves their ability to talk about projects, and pairing or grouping children to work on crafts together helps them see what can be accomplished through many hands.
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