History

Use recycled materials to recreate historical buildings. This craft activity can be taken in a lot of fun directions. The simplest option is to build models of famous buildings, but there are many other possibilities:

• Children could recreate a street from a specified time period as a group.
• Show students the ruin of an ancient building and ask them to create a version of the original based on their knowledge and imagination.
• Talk about ancient building practices and see if you can replicate them in class, e.g. mini wattle and daub huts.

English

There are all sorts of fun ways to brings books into the real world with craft. There are so many possibilities. The most important resource when creating crafts from stories will be your students’ imagination. With minimal physical resources, they will be able to find things that bring the stories to life for them. Letting them decide what to make will also provide an insight into what story elements stood out to them as important or memorable. For more involved craft activities here’s some inspiration to get you started:

• Make a Cat in the Hat inspired hat
• Make a Very Hungry Caterpillar
• Make swords and crowns
• Students could also make finger puppets or cardboard roll puppets of the characters to act out the stories.

Puppet Making

Another way to combine English and craft is to introduce fun ways of telling stories such as:

• Story dice – Story dice are a great way to help students find inspiration for their writing activities. They are also a fun and creative way to generate story prompts. Gather some wooden cubes and colourful labels. Ask students to write a phrase or draw an image on each label. Place a different label on each side of the cube. Now students can roll the dice to generate prompts for their stories. To increase the challenge they can roll multiple story dice and attempt to integrate all of the prompts into one story.
• Story box – Use different sized boxes to create a nesting doll inspired ‘book’. Different parts of the story are written on the outside of different boxes. These boxes are then hidden inside each other. Reading the story becomes an adventure as the students travel through the layers of boxes to reveal the story.

Maths

A fun math-based craft activity is teaching students how to create their own abacus. This is not only fun, but it is also a useful tool that they can keep with them throughout the term. Crafting the abacus themselves also allows them to customise it to their skill level and decorate it any way they choose. This blog from Kids STEAM Lab has instructions for an abacus made entirely from recycled material including kids’ old drawings. To get them even more engaged with actively using the abacus, you could ask them to come up with maths-based games and activities for their classmates to try on their new abacus.

Geography

Geography often works on scales that are hard for young students to understand. One way to make these big concepts more tangible is to craft physical representations.

• This ‘My World’ paper plate craft helps students to understand the world and how they fit into it geographically by working from the small (their home) to the massive (the planet).
• Make a flag – Lessons on world geography often include a country’s flag and its significance. Have students create their own flag with elements that represent them and their family.

P.S Check out this AMAZING blog we found which lists all the benefits that art activities provides to our children: Mom Loves Best Art Benefits Blog

Mom Loves Best is a fantastic website started by Moms in the US, to help other mothers who are struggling and striving to do their best but feel totally overwhelmed at times. Whether you’re pregnant, taking care of your newborn, or interested in becoming a more well-rounded parent, you’ll find resources on their website to help: Mom Loves Best Website