Traditional, copycat crafts have long been the norm in most early childhood classrooms and kindergarten classrooms, despite not having any educational or developmental theories to support them.

What can be wrong with these adorable, sometimes intricate projects that have have been sent home from preschool and kindergarten classrooms for as long as any of us can remember?

Meeting students where they are at.

Many years ago, my oldest daughter was enrolled in a small, private preschool and I took her there for orientation. The not-yet three-year-old children were moving around the room playing in the different centers. One of the tables had some construction paper shapes cut up near some papers with some paste.

A little girl went over to the table, put some paste on a shape, pasted it down on her paper and sat back. She was done. As I sat nearby watching, the teacher walked over to the little girl, sat down next to her, picked up the paper, turned it over and said “Look, it sticks.”

This teacher understood where this young child was at. She was meeting the child where she was at by understanding where she was developmentally. She needed to learn what paste actually does.

When curriculum developers create curriculum, they use children’s ages and stages to figure out what they should learn, and when. Recognizing that children learn and grow at different rates, they know what children are capable of at different ages and give recommendations on what curriculum will be absorbed best.

Young children need to learn how materials work before they can actually make things out of them. The problem with this is that young children playing with materials create “messy” art and many teachers (and parents) can’t deal with that. They need to have beautiful, adorable crafts that everyone will “ooh and aah” over. They can’t be worried if it’s age-appropriate or not.

Let them go through their stages.

We ought to allow children to go through their stages in the proper order in the same way we don’t try to get them to walk before they crawl. Doing so allows them a place to express themselves and enjoy the art-making without feeding into our own adult perfectionism. We also can watch how they create to pick up any clues that might show us that they are more or less advanced than they should be.

Many years ago, during my time as a preschool director, the teachers would use their bulletin boards to display the children’s art. As I would walk through the halls, I was usually able to tell from the artwork which children were more advanced and which ones were having issues. This had nothing to do with artistic skills as we’re talking about basic paintings and collages.

Another example of this was in my role as an art teacher. I gave a first- grade class a project to create a winter collage using torn papers. I still have the pictures showing the great disparity between two children in the class.

One of them was a detailed picture of a snowman with all the trimmings, while the other was of a bunch of large ripped papers glued randomly on top of each other. When I showed it to the principal she couldn’t get over how they mirrored what was going on in each child’s academic world…

When we push children into creating crafts that are OUR ideas and not appropriate for their age, we are pushing them into a box to get them to conform to activities that are not good for them.

About Faigie Kobre

Faigie Kobre is a former preschool/kindergarten teacher and preschool director. She taught 3 yr old’s, 4 yr old’s, and 5 yr old’s, and the past 11 years has been an elementary school art teacher using the TAB method.

Faigie also gives professional development workshops on art for kids for early childhood and early elementary school. Her “Beyond Copycat Crafts” program is a transformative initiative designed to revolutionize early childhood education through innovative art instruction that can be done anywhere in the world.

Rooted in her experience and expertise, this program empowers teachers, educators, principals, and directors (and homeschoolers) to move beyond traditional copycat crafts and embrace a child-centric approach to art education.

Learn more about Faigie at www.eduart4kids.com.