Arts & Crafts with Toddlers

This post is for you, Aralyn, and for anyone else who cares for groups of toddlers. Much of it can also be used by moms at home with their kids.

One thing I've noticed working in childcare is that parents love having craft projects that get sent home. I think that it gives them a way to visualize what their children were doing during the day, and it also can form a bridge between home and 'school.' So they have their value. However, arts & crafts projects can be a real challenge with toddlers, who have limited impulse control, limited ability to follow directions, and limited understanding of what you do or don't want on your chairs, floors and walls. Many projects end up with the teachers doing 90% of the work, and the children doing lots of waiting for the teacher's help.

What crafts can be done successfully with toddlers, and in such a way that both the children and caregivers really enjoy it?

1. Coloring is an easy craft to do. Make big coloring mats out of cotton-backed vinyl (available at most fabric stores) or even just taking a quarter-inch stack of single-page newspapers and putting a strong border of masking tape or duct tape around the edges. Use big, sturdy crayons (I like the Stockmar stick crayons best; you can find them at Three Sisters Toys ). I keep the crayons in a bowl and allow each child to pick two crayons to use. If they want to switch colors, they must put one of their crayons back in the bowl to pick another. When children are done coloring, they put both crayons back in the bowl, and put their picture in their cubby, and they are free to play.

2. Baking is a project that children of all ages love. We bake all the time at Rainbow Bridge, but we usually eat what we bake. One day I realized it could be turned into a craft project by having each child form his dough into a shape, and decorate it with raisins. I remembered which was whose, and we sent them home at the end of the day. The kids were excited to show their parents, and parents were pleased to receive them. The trick to baking successfully with toddlers is to be very organized. Assemble all of the ingredients you'll need before you start. The initial mixing parts are all about waiting and turn-taking, so I always go around the table in a circle so the children know when their turn will come. Let each child hold the measuring cup and pour in one ingredient. When you're done, each child can take a turn mixing. Sing a short song (I use All Around the Mulberry Bush), and when the song is over, the child passes the bowl and spoon to the child next to her. After the dough has risen comes the fun part, kneading. Everyone can knead at the same time, and I knead too. You have to make your own rules about whether they are allowed to take nibbles or not, and how many. After the kneading is done, bring out the raisins to decorate, and put them on a cookie sheet. These projects bake quickly, usually 15 minutes or so.

3. Watercolor painting can be done with toddlers, but it's very difficult if you're on your own with six kids, as it needs constant supervision. If you want to do this, invite a parent volunteer to come in and help.

4. Seasonal Crafts: There are always crafts to do with the seasons.

1. For fall, put leaves under paper and color over top with block crayons or the side of a stick crayon. You can also iron leaves between sheets of wax paper (a challenge if you're by yourself with the kids), and decorate the edges with paintings or colored paper. Make apple crisp, or pumpkin pie from a pumpkin, and save pieces for each parent. You can also make apple-gnomes, putting a little felt hat onto an apple and carving eyes and a mouth. As it dries out and withers, the gnome's face gets more and more wrinkled and cool looking.  Here's an example: http://www.appledolls.org/page2.html

2. For Winter, have kids color with blue and purple, then cut the drawing into a snowflake for the child to take home. Make pomander oranges to send home. This is a one-on-one project to do with each child: attach a ribbon to the orange (you can use pins to make it stay), and then you poke a hole in the orange with a toothpick or a darning needle, and the child puts a clove into the hole. You don't have to cover the whole orange, you can make designs with the cloves: http://www.aromatherapy-at-home.com/. Also, making snowmen with the children and dressing them in scarves and hats, with gloves on the ends of their stick arms, is fun. Parents can't take it home, but it can be showed off and parents can imagine their child making it.

3. For Spring, of course plant things! Plant crocus and hyacinth bulbs in pots and grow them indoors. I've done very successful Mother's Day gifts where the children decorated small pots, and we planted marigolds in them together. Both the decorating and the planting were done outside. We also make an Easter Egg tree with blown eggs: take a branch from a flowering tree and put it in a vase weighted down with pebbles (the kids can help with the pebbles).  Depending on what climate you live in, it can be great to start with a bare branch, then watch the leaves come out, then the flowers. One by one, you can blow eggs and decorate them with the kids, either with paint and a paint-brush, or with scraps of different colored tissue paper. Just dab a drop of water onto the egg, and a child can put a scrap piece of tissue paper onto the water. Put 3-4 layers of tissue paper over the whole egg. We hang each egg on the 'tree,' then the day before spring break each child got to take one home.  Also, growing wheat grass is easy and fun.  Get baskets from a thrift store, line them with plastic (sturdy plastic wrap, or those plastic holders you put under flower pots), and put your wheat grass inside.  You can use dirt or just the wheat berries by themselves; soak them overnight and don't let them dry out.  Each child can take a basket home before Spring Break.

4. For Summer, wet felting can be a very fun outdoor activity: http://www.ourbigearth.com/. We made balls and then attached 'comet-tails' of ribbons to them, and called them meteor balls (in Colorado August sees many meteor showers). We didn't send them home as craft projects, but you certainly could.

Hope that gets your creative juices flowing! The first key to doing crafts with toddlers (especially if you're alone), is to think the process through and do as much work up-front as you can, gathering all of the materials you'll need, etc. The second key is, just do one step at a time, and keep it containable. By this I mean that you may be called away from the project at any moment if a child across the room is having problems, so you need to be able to pick things up and put them on the counter if it's something kids can't touch without supervision. And third, don't rush, just relax and have fun. After all, if nobody's enjoying it, what's the point?

Warmly,
Faith

Picky Eaters

I have had quite a few parents ask what to do about picky eaters. Mealtimes can turn into seemingly-endless sessions of coaxing and cajoling each bite into a child's mouth, trying this and that, and ending up with pasta and bagels being 80% of your child's diet. Parents of children who are tiny or under their ideal weight are especially susceptible, but even the parents of big, strapping children can fall into these patterns.

The crux of converting a child away from being a picky eater is to change your viewpoint: your goal is not to get calories into your child's body by whatever means necessary; your goal is to help your child develop a healthy relationship to food. With this goal in mind, your responsibilities, and your attitude, can change. Your responsibility, as the parent, is to provide your child with healthy food. Their responsibility, as the child, is to eat the food. You cannot do this for them, nor can you force them to do it. You can simply do your job effectively, and know that they are capable of doing theirs. Being anxious about a child eating (or not eating) does nothing except to make the child feel anxiety around food. So what CAN you do? There are several concrete actions that can set the stage for healthy eating.

Let Children Help
One of the best ways to help children develop a healthy relationship to food is to involve them in the food preparations. Children are far less likely to be critical of food that they have helped create. I have been amazed time and again at what so-called “picky” eaters will eat out of the garden if they can help pick it. And in the kitchen, cooking is always an interactive experience at my house: children can help chop veggies or fruit (even a two-year-old can chop mushrooms or hack at zucchini slices with a table-knife), they can put veggies I've chopped into the bowl before they go onto the stove, or they can pour or stir things that we've measured. Also, children get to taste every ingredient I use, including the strange ones. They taste the oil, the salt, the lemon-juice, every raw vegetable including very tiny slices of onion, even sometimes a grain or two of uncooked rice. I talk about what each thing tastes like (sweet, sour, spicy, bland), I laugh at their funny faces when they taste something unexpected, and I'll even talk about how the taste or texture changes when it cooks. Food is something to be explored and savored.

Don't Change the Menu
The other important thing to do to convert your picky eater is to stand firm and be confident in the healthy food choices you've made for that meal. Don't “give in” and let them have slices of bagel -or whatever it is that they like- if they choose not to eat the food you've prepared for that meal. Bagels are so yummy, why would they possibly branch out to broccoli or peas if they know that they just need to wait a bit for the bagel? But if they know that whatever you prepare is all that's forthcoming, they're much more likely to eat. If they choose not to eat much, you can prepare them another meal or a snack in an hour or two. It's OK for them to learn that if they don't eat what you prepare for them, they will be hungry for a bit.

On this subject, don't stop offering a healthy food to a child just because they don't like it. Research has shown that children's tastes for foods change with repeated exposure. I have certainly experienced this working in daycare and early childhood settings. I try to use seasonal vegetables as much as possible, and the first few times a new veggie will often be rejected by some of the children. However, usually by the fifth time a new veggie is served, everyone is eating it (of course, the fact that they know nothing else will be forthcoming if they hold out probably helps). With this in mind, I changed the mealtime vocabulary so that when a child says, “I don't like this,” I gently correct, “You're still learning to like this.”

Tell Stories About Food
I sometimes tell stories about foods I didn't like when I was a youngster, that I have since developed a taste for. But I do this with a light touch, more as a funny or distracting story than as a heavy morality tale. Kids love to hear stories about mom or dad when they were little. An even more successful type of food story I'll tell is when a child tells me, “I don't like carrots,” I'll say, “Really? Do you know the story of carrots?” Then I'll tell them:

“Carrots come from the tiniest of tiny little seeds. The seeds are so small that you can hardly pick one up by itself. So you have to be very careful when you plant them, not to spill too many in one spot! Before you plant them, you prepare the soil, and put the tiny little seeds in the ground, and each day you water them. The sun shines down, and the rain falls, and finally one day, a tiny little sprout peeks its head out of the soil. It's so delicate, if you step on it, or if the soil dries out, it will surely die. But you're careful, and you water it every day, and it starts to grow bigger and bigger. It becomes leafy and green with the most beautiful, lacy leaves. But where is the carrot, you ask? There's nothing orange here, only green leaves! Let me tell you: it is growing underneath the ground, where we can't see it! Bit by bit it grows down, down, getting thicker and longer each day. Until one day we see the top of it poking out of the soil, and we know it's ripe. We get our trowel to loosen the soil, then thwop! Out it comes! Covered with dirt, we put our carrots into a basket and bring them into the kitchen, where we chop off the tops, then we scrub-scrub-scrub all the dirt off them, then chop them up, and cook them, and now here they are, in our bowls!”

This story can be told for any fruit, vegetable, or grain, quite easily, as well as milk and juice. For things I don't personally grow in the garden, like rice, I'll tell about where they grow it, and how the farmer sends it to the store for moms and dads to buy. The story itself is so fascinating, and many children forget that they “don't like” carrots and happily eat them up as they hear the story. Even if they don't, I don't make a big deal out of it. Some day they will eat them; maybe even tomorrow.

Use Humor
For my hardest, hardcore hold-outs, I'll sometimes dangle a special type of reward in front of them. I'll say, “Some day, you will eat your whole bowl with everything in it, and I'll be so surprised, I'll fall right out of my chair!” Then, the first time it happens, I ham it up, falling out of my chair with shock and pride. I have done this successfully for several different children, but I'll only do it for children who are really tough hold-outs (where I really WILL be surprised if they eat it all), and I'll only do it once per child. I don't need mealtimes to turn into circus acts!

Final Thoughts
And, finally, there is the comment that my mother used on us when we were young, which worked quite well. When one of us kids would say, “I don't like this,” she'd calmly reply, “That's OK. You don't have to like everything you eat.” And you know what? Remembering that helped me innumerable times as I traveled around the world in my teens and twenties, and exposed me to many things I otherwise would never have tried.