Do you have a crafter in your family? My almost 5-year old loves crafts. She crafts almost every day. When she is upset, she will go to her corner at the table, pull out her supplies and cut and glue things to paper to calm down. Most days I go to throw something in the garbage or recycling and I hear my daughter pleading for its redemption. “I want it for my crafts”. She takes the reuse part of Reduce Reuse Recycle to heart.
We do need to get better at putting supplies away once we are finished with them, but so often she is crafting and then we need to head out the door for some thing or another and projets remain half done. With working on a craft, it’s also hard to get started if you know you’ll have to clean everything up 30 minutes later. It stifles the creativity. Sometimes you just need to keep things out. I want my kids to live in a house where they can experiment, try, fail, be creative, make a mess, and just live like kids. So yes, my house looks like a tornado blew through it at 5 pm each day when we begin a family clean up.
One of my favourite homeschooling gurus is Julie Bogart, author of The Brave Learner. Julie encourages families to have always-available art tables for kids to be creative. She writes about her friend Dotty, who inspired her to do this with her kids in the first place.
“In the center of the small living room (you know, that space into which you invite guests) stood a large sturdy table jam-packed with art supplies – paint brushes of varying sizes in tin cans, glass baby food jars to hold water, google eyes, pipe cleaners, glitter, all varieties of glue, colored and butcher paper, paints and modeling clay, pastels and markers, and scissors for lefties and righties. Overhead a clotheline hung art projects to drip-dry.”
Julie Bogart, the Brave Learner, p4
I seriously love this homeschool atmosphere. I’ve tried for years to create something similar for my kids – while also balancing my husband’s very legitimate ban on glitter. To his point, I have not had the *best* track record with glitter. One time we made sensory bottles with glitter and glue and water. I thought the bottle was sealed tightly. It wasn’t. It burst open when he was home with the kids and I was out shopping. It made a huge mess and we still have glitter glued to our kitchen floor. Another time, I thought – well, glitter is banned. But glitter paint isn’t glitter right? So I bought glitter paint, brought it into the house, and then my daughter was carrying the bottle of paint into the kitchen and dropped it. The top cracked off and gold glitter paint splatted all over the floor, all over the dog, and the kitchen cabinets. I cleaned it up swiftly, while it was still wet and prayed my husband would never find out. I didn’t notice the splatters of glitter paint on the kitchen wall until it was dry. So yes, we also have glitter painted to the kitchen walls.
I want a home where kids can make art, make mistakes, be messy. But also, I can’t live in a glittery cluttered hovel. At the end of each day, I want my home picked up, reset, and ready for another day of creating. Thus, I’ve settled to not have an art table in the middle of the living room – but I have put the kids craft supplies in small plastic bins on a shelf that they can reach and access freely. (The glitter, however, is in a box along with the permanent markers in a cupboard high above my husband’s desk labelled “DANGEROUS”.)
Having the craft supplies readily available to my kids does come with a lot of mess, with or without glitter. Like most children, my daughter is great at pulling out her supplies. But at 5 pm when dinner is forthcoming, the supplies get shoved back in the box in a higgledy piggledy mess.
I have 9 shoe-box sized clear containers of craft supplies. They used to be somewhat organized. But over-time they’ve all become mixed to look something like this inside:
We can’t find much of anything in them. The glue sticks are dried out. There are little bits of garbage mixed in there. The play value and creativity is reduced because we can’t see the forest through the trees of feathers, sequins, and popsicle sticks.
So today, as part of our school day, my 4 year old and I sorted the craft supplies. Sorting is a pre-k math concept – so that definitely counts.
Ahhhh! That’s better. It’s nice to do a little refresh every once in a while.
How do you store your kids’ craft supplies? Do you have any genius hacks to share? Would love to hear in the comments below!
-Heather