Charity shop resources: Usborne I can crayon.

In my perennial search for educational resources, I haunt charity shops. And I struck lucky with a copy of Usborne’s I can crayon the other day. So far it’s given us two days of art activities, which means cutting, sticking, colouring and drawing. All sorts of wonderful early year activities 😉

There’s a tiny bit of the teacher left in me, despite the best efforts of my children to beat it out. Every now and then I feel the urge to explain something that no one has asked about, or try to wangle an extra bit of stuff into a perfectly good activity. I usually find if I sit down with a cuppa the urge passes off, but it gets more difficult when I’m planning things to do to keep the little children occupied. I want to just plan fun stuff, but I find myself with half an eye on skills and development, thinking about if I was filling a report in.

Thing is that I know that as long as I do that, then I know I’m taking part of the control away from the children, and that that will get in the way of their learning. And Smallest has a stubborn streak a lot wider than those little shoulders, while Tigerboy just doesn’t really do being told.

And in case I’d forgotten that, I got a refresher course yesterday 😉

We were doing making a butterfly. In the book you stick pieces of card to half a piece of paper, fold the paper over, crayon over it, then cut out a butterly shape.

Me being me, I decided we’d stick card to card so we could do it once and use it over. I didn’t think about how long filling an A4 size piece of card with smaller pieces was going to take. Or how long the glue would take to dry. Or that Smallest would struggle to cut card, given I couldn’t find her decent left handed scissors (since located and put into a scissors and glue box so that they can always be found.

Smallest didn’t want to cut triangles, and she didn’t want to put the glue on to the base card. And do you know what? I should have left her to do it her own way, instead of getting stressy. Lesson learnt. For me.

Eventually we had filled bits of card. And crayoned beautiful patterns over them, and cut out butterflies. And then two very happy children played with their butterflies for ages.

Today we did snakes. And I pretty much left them to it. It was good.