Arts & Crafts
Where words fall short, art takes over. When young learners engage in Arts & Crafts, they explore new ways of communicating and expressing themselves. During the early years, all children struggle to communicate their thoughts and feelings verbally as their language skills are still developing. Art provides children with a new way of connecting their inner world with the outer world. Basic arts and crafts exercises can be profoundly liberating for the young mind.
Art provides learners with a medium for developing fine motor skills as well as important cognitive skills, especially when creativity is unleashed in a supervised but unstructured manner. When a child uses scissors, opens a bottle of paint, or uses a rolling pin to mold clay, they strengthen small muscles in their hands and wrists needed later on to master skills such as using a pencil at school. Open-ended crafting allows learners to engage in counterfactual reasoning, a process by which one creates possible alternatives to life events. These “what if…” thoughts are the foundation of curiosity and innovation in later learning.