It was a morning in early February when the thought of another routine homeschool day struck me as satisfying as eating chalk for breakfast.
We’d spent the last few months studying sentence structure and tackling new math concepts. I needed a break. We all needed a break.
So let’s talk homeschool arts and crafts.
Why hadn’t I thought of it before? I could pull out the craft container for homeschool arts and crafts.
Valentine’s was coming soon.
I’d spent plenty of time scanning pretty pictures on Pinterest, now I might actually use one of them.
Out the craft tote came…
- cleaned peanut butter jars filled with craft paper,
- jars of glitter,
- plastic gems of sapphire and rubies,
- and anything else found in a dollar store.
I threw a library CD of the story of Robin Hood onto the stereo and off we went, crafting.
Back and forth between one child and the next…
- preventing glue messes,
- sparkle explosions,
- snips of paper on the floor, in the cracks of the table, and plastered to the side of Zach’s cheek.
This was all too much fun for me.
Sure enough, the kids clocked more time crafting than they would in their books, but we’d just given me a reason to speed up spring cleaning by three months.
Now I remember why we hadn’t done this before…
Fast forward just two months and we’ve done it three more times, the Alice in Wonderland birthday for Madelyn, the Little Women birthday for Hannah, and now Easter crafting celebrations.
Turns out, a homeschool mom can have fun crafting with four kids.
It just requires less free-for-all and more guidance…(a concept I’m learning is applicable to happiness in many aspects of parenting).
As Shakespeare once said,
to craft or not to craft, that is the question
(it’s possible this isn’t Shakespeare),
To layer, perchance to mat,
Whether it is nobler in the mind to decoupage, or embellish,
To trim, perhaps to weep to wet the mulberry,
Spirelli or spin, or seal, or stick, or stamp or emboss,
aye there’s always the rub (or transfer),
Or simply dust. And what would be the fun in that?
