Creative activities are a great way for your child to express their own thoughts, ideas and emotions; Whilst exploring their own curiosity as they learn about their world and the bigger world too. So what has art got to do with David Attenborough? Read on and you'll see!
C’s love for sharks started at around 7 months old with the introduction of Baby Shark (We found a much nicer version of this song, with a fun video, by Super Simple Songs on YouTube.) I made a canvas of sea-creatures; His is footprints made sharks and lobsters, and his up-side down hands made turtles. I enjoyed doodling details onto them and adding googly-eyes to bring them to life. Team work!
We’ve got pop-up books, lift-the-flap books, fact books and stories all about sharks and sea creatures. Art and Reading: The perfect duo!
Playdough sharks; Paper plate jellyfish; Drawing Octopuses by tracing around our hands. Whenever we do arts and crafts together, there is an opportunity for C to express his love of marine life and a way for him to use his imagination to come up with a way of using the art materials to create something from the Ocean world.
Creating a shoe-box aquarium from recycled materials and making an under the sea collage using water-colour paints and scrunched up tissue paper, are just some of the ways in which he has expressed his interest and love of all fish and the sea.
Now in year 1, his curiosity for this under-water wilderness is growing; His teacher told us that she has given C the nickname of ‘My Little David Attenborough’ because he likes to tell her and his classmates all about wildlife facts.
I’ll take that! I could not be prouder of him. And guess what? I’ll let you in on a little secret…
Arts and Crafts are not his first choice in activity! He much prefers to spend time playing on Sonic the Hedgehog, building Lego and writing numbers. I still think it is vitally important to expose C to creative activities such as arts and crafts because they will help him to develop creative thinking skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making. As well as teaching him patience, cause and effect and a multitude of transferable skills that will absolutely nurture his curious mind and prepare him for Year 2 and beyond!
Once a week I give him a box of art activities and ideas that we dip in and out of, and I see where they take him…Sometimes he explores something new; a different part of the natural world; land-dwelling animals! And sometimes, his imagination will take us right back to the Under-water world. And that is brilliant. When he uses his art box, he gets to learn new skills, whilst developing skills he already has. Skills for school and life beyond school. He has new materials to use and ideas to try out. Ideas that quite often combine with the mind of a little David Attenborough and we get some more super shark art!
