Craft for toddlers and pre-schoolers

[hypocore]

There is a strong difference between art and crafts and both have their places. True art is the learning of process with no expected outcome at all. You give them materials to explore with, not always what's expected and with no models and no rules.

For instance, with art, you give them paint and things like cars, dinosaurs or feathers then let them put the items in the paint and then on the paper. They discover what kind of stroke or print the items make and they experiment with how much paint, how much pressure, how many times in one spot...and so on. This is not attached to any theme or lesson.

Or you give them paper on an easel with paint and various sizes of brushes, q-tips, sponges etc, and again they explore with what does what and how each thing looks.

Or you give them various materials like cloth pieces, tissue, buttons, straws and paper and let them make their own designs with whatever they want on the paper.

Anything else is a craft with an expected outcome of some sort. Even painting pumpkins is a craft because just the learning of pumpkins goes hand in hand with Fall/Harvest/Halloween/Thanksgiving.
All crafts should be done with some personal freedom to choose and the child should never truly be expected to copy a sample exactly.

From one of my own examples up thread...if you give a child sandpaper in no specific shape and allow them to try markers, crayons, pencils and then iron it it becomes Art. Once you put the sandpaper in a shape or limit it to crayons, it becomes a craft.

True art is done separately from crafts. It usually has it's own shelf for the child to pick from what they want to do and when they want to do it. Crafts are set out by the adult and done connecting a theme and put away when completed.