Outside the Box Craft Blogs

If you are like most teachers, especially if you are a "craft impaired" teacher, you are always looking for craft ideas that are new and different beyond the usual hand print turkey at Thanksgiving and vegetable print painting in the spring.  Add these blogs to your RSS reader or just bookmark them to visit periodically for new ideas to try out. 

• The Crafty Crow - with entries like "What can you do with paper tubes?" and many crafts related to children's literature this is a great blog to have on the ready
• Dollar Store Crafts - the name pretty much says it all 
• Kid's Craft Weekly - is a free weekly newsletter you can have sent to your email in box or you can go through the archives
• Kiddio - another mixed content blog with a link to kids crafts entries, these projects are very cute
• Made by Joel - mostly crafts to make for kids, but many can be made with kids and/or using various assistive technology adaptivations
• Make and Take Kids Crafts - these craft and activity ideas tend to flow with the seasons and their holidays
• Mel's Own Place - the most recent post is drawing with fabric paint on plastic bottle caps to make stamps, my suggestion is to hot glue some spools inside to adapt them and your off, check out this site
• Mineco - Eco-crafts and recycled crafts to do with children (great site for the eco heavy Unique units if you are a Unique Learning teacher)
• One Crafty Place - does not appear to be recently updated but has some great activity ideas
• Plaid Kid Crafts - all sorts of craft ideas to try with kids
• Roots and Wings - another multi-topic "mommy blog" however the craft ideas in this one usually lead to an activity you can do with the project (water bottle ring toss, science experiments with an altoids tin before crafting with it)
• Silly Eagle Books - this is a "mommy blog" (said with the utmost of respect some of my favorite blogs are "mommy blogs") about favorite children's books which often has activities and crafts to go with the books written about 
• Skip to My Lou's - all sorts of simple craft ideas in a multi-topic blog
• Zakka Life - is a blog about crafts and recipes but this link goes to their kids craft ideas and instructions

When doing crafts in your classroom you are going to want to consider all the ways you can possibly integrate assistive technology (your pouring cup for glitter, your environmental control box with a switch and a hair dryer to dry crafts or your battery operated scissors with a switch for cutting) in addition to embedding as many communication opportunities as possible (see this post).

Also it helps to remind each other that parents, in general, do NOT WANT what Robert Rummel-Hudson calls Macaroni Art (see the sixth paragraph of this blog entry).  Parents can tell what their child has actually worked on and participated in versus what they sat next to an adult for while the adult did the work.  A friend of mine was telling me recently how her son, who "participates" in art class by directing his 1:1 aide on her drawings had taken to writing notes to the 1:1 complementing the improvement in her drawing skills.  That mother wonders why her child even takes art.  (Especially since the children aren't allowed to talk with each other while they work so it isn't for socialization.)

While we do our arts and crafts projects we have to be clear about our goals and objectives for the lesson and how doing the project helps students meet their IEP goals and objectives.  In fact it might help to write about the child's process in completing the project on the back or on an index card attached to the project so everyone is clear.  How can we answer the questions, "How is this child participating as fully as possible in ALL aspects of this project?" and "What is the purpose of this child participating in this project?"