If you teach Early Years, you probably love doing arts and crafts lessons as much as your learners do, but they can easily go wrong. In this blog post, we will explore some simple tips on how Toy Team, our new preschool course from Oxford University Press, can help you make these lessons more manageable.
1. Select arts and crafts carefully
We often find crafts online that we think will look beautiful in our classroom. However, we should be thinking about what our learners can achieve (without having to spend hours at home pre-cutting things). Toy Team makes it easy for you, as all the craft projects have been carefully selected to slowly incorporate skills appropriate for your learners’ fine motor skills.
I like to begin by teaching my learners how to create crafts by tearing paper, then using simple folds, and then moving on to glue, scissors, and finally paint.
2. Model all stages slowly and do them as a group
Arts and crafts seem easy from an adult’s perspective, but they involve incredible communication between our hands, eyes, and both sides of the brain to achieve even the simplest of tasks.
It is important to be patient and take it slowly. Demonstrate how to do each task step by step, even if it is just folding a piece of paper in half. Try to divide this action into lots of little steps for your learners to do with you, all together. You can practice without paper and then with paper. Just take it very slowly.
3. Encourage learners to ask for the tools
Arts and crafts projects are a great way to get your learners using the target language, but they are also useful to practice functional language like ‘Can I have…?’.
Instead of having big boxes in the middle of the table with all the materials, encourage learners to ask for the tools they need. This will give you more time to deal with learner difficulties, the perfect excuse to need a teacher’s helper, and another way of introducing language into the classroom.
4. Search for tricks to help learners with scissors
Don’t underestimate the importance of scissors. They are a fantastic tool to get learners to develop the pre-literacy and fine motor skills they need to write.
Research tips and tricks on how to teach scissors skills and how to help learners who are struggling a bit more. You can use special scissors, add stickers so learners know which hole their thumb goes in, or even add a folder under their arms to help them maintain the correct position to cut. These are the tricks that worked for me, and I promise they made my arts and crafts lessons much more accessible to all my learners and safer. In the Toy Team series, scissors are introduced following your learner’s progression. Starting with shortcuts, then long cuts, and finally, the hardest of them all, curved or circular cuts.
5. Have extra arts and crafts tasks for fast finishers
Learners will work at different paces. Some will love arts and crafts, so they will be delicate and take their time. Others will grab a black crayon and scribble everywhere.
Make sure you have plenty of extra tasks for the fast finishers. I have a set of laminated materials that learners can use once they have finished their tasks. These can be colouring pages of their favourite things (for example, the Toy Team characters), different traceable lines, play-dough or plasticine, or they can help you hand out the materials.
6. Make the most of arts and crafts!
Once the craft is finished, make the most of it. All the Toy Team craft projects are specifically created to encourage your learners to practice the language you have been teaching them. Whether they use the crafts to present their family to the class or for a restaurant roleplay, these are all great opportunities to play and learn together. Furthermore, a chance to strengthen the home-school link and get even more language practice when the children use the crafts at home with their parents.
And finally, we mustn’t forget…
7. Clean up time
Include five minutes in your routine to tidy up the mess. Playing “The Tidy Up Song” from the routine songs list in Toy Team works well to make this stage more fun, and the learners know exactly what to do when it begins.
I have a tidy-up routine in all my classes, whether we do arts and crafts or not. It will save you a lot of time and hassle.
What about you? How do you manage your arts and crafts lessons?
Julia Mena Dobson is an ELT teacher, trainer, and author, specialising in early years, young learners, and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). With a background in fine art, Julia incorporates creativity into her teaching materials, emphasising self-expression and motor skills. Along with her work on Toy Team, she has developed a six-level arts and crafts CLIL series for Oxford University Press.
