Why are Art & Crafts so important for the development of your child?

Early childhood development has become the need of the hour. Learning is an integral part of early childhood development and it is not only limited to academics. Art and craft is not only for fun and recreation, it serves a bigger purpose and plays a major role in your child’s brain development. Using art and craft as a medium in early childhood education, helps your child learn via play. Isn’t play the best form of learning?

Art is a powerful way of expressing emotions. Even a child, who doesn’t have a full-fledged vocabulary, can express themselves through art. Working on a simple craft actually benefits your child on a large scale. Your child learns to focus on a single task at hand, gains an insight into new concepts and words, makes use of their motor skills and more importantly self-confidence.

How can art and crafts benefit your child?

Learn through play

‘Play is the work of the child’. With play, children tend to absorb the concepts easily. Art and crafts are fascinating to your child because they provide many open ended opportunities to explore through sensory play. Sensory plays have numerous benefits and research shows increased brain function with children who are exposed to sensory plays often.

Screen free family time

Since the advent of mobile phones and electronics, screen free times are getting rare in families. Working on art and craft projects together, strengthens your family bond and instills values such as sharing, helping and coordinating as a team in your children.

Develops hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills

Hand-eye coordination involves processing visual inputs and combining them with body awareness. Fine motor skills help your child to strengthen their finger muscles which helps to prepare for writing.

Some activities that strengthens your child’s hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills include

• Coloring

• Finger painting

• Stringing beads and pasta

• Using Play-doh

• Scissors

• Gluing

• Pasting

Builds self-esteem

When children learn to work their way with something of their own, they gain confidence about their abilities. Right amount of appreciation helps in building a positive image about them. Doing art and crafts helps them to rectify their mistakes by themselves and exposes them to try new ways to create.

Enhances creativity

With crafting, your child will come up with new ideas to express themselves. They get the freedom to explore and create anything they want without any restrictions through art.

Improves memory and concentration

You might have seen a toddler drawing something random and they say “Ma, this is an elephant!!”. By doing this, they learn to map the image in their memory with the drawing. Doing art is a great activity to improve their attention span and helps to concentrate better on the task at hand.

Develops decision making abilities

Your child will learn to solve problems through crafting. The ability to solve problems stems from making good decisions. Thus art and crafts provide an excellent medium to explore different possibilities to solve problems and arrive at a solution.

Teaches cultural values

With today’s fast moving world, we often don’t get enough time to teach our children about the rich cultural values of our family and the nation. By introducing your children to art and craft based activities related to the theme, they can understand and learn more about cultures, traditions and get connected to the roots.

At The Curious Bees, we aim to make learning fun through our carefully curated products. With all of the benefits listed above, we bet that you and your children will have loads of fun while working through each activity.