home :: arts and crafts

Educational Arts and Crafts Projects for your homeschooling curriculum

Most children love arts and crafts, and if you are a homeschooling family you can integrate these projects with just about every lesson you’re studying. Scrapbooking art projects are terrific for children, and can easily be used to incorporate writing skills, story telling, graphic design, history, social studies and computer related lessons. Arts and crafts allow children to express their creativity, and scrapbooking art projects are extremely flexible. When you use scrapbooking in your curriculum, your homeschool materials will include pretty papers, stickers, colored markers and other fun tools, like circle cutters, and stencils.

Most people think more traditionally when they think of arts and crafts projects for children, like crayons and coloring books, or painting. Incorporating art projects that are outside the norm introduce you to a whole new set of teaching opportunities. Many teachers, both in school and homeschool environments have their students keep a journal of some kind. Scrapbooking is basically an extension of keeping a journal, in that it also allows some creative liberties using photographs, fun paper and stickers. A scrapbook can be created to cover a wide range of topics, or you can create mini albums that are subject oriented- for instance, a continuous project could be an album to document the child’s schooling. Let the child create a portfolio of their work, saving some of their favorite writing samples, and inserting photographs of places or events that correlate with the topic of each writing assignment. You could create an album that covers your family history, or even the history of the United States- taking photographs from magazines, or photocopying images from your homeschool materials such as encyclopedias, or printing information from web sites.

Scrapbooking is a nontraditional way to integrate arts and crafts projects into your homeschool curriculum. Rather than just providing art projects to your children, using scrapbooks allows you to incorporate so many of the lessons you want to cover while encouraging your child’s creativity at the same time.