Great Kids Craft Internet Sites
Review of kidscraftweekly.com
Kidscraftweekly.com is a resourceful website about crafting with toddlers and preschoolers.
Kidscraftweekly.com is a creative and handy site on crafting with small children around ages 2 to 5. It excels at all the prerequisites for a great kids’ craft site. Your guides: a mom and her two little kids. Your materials: manageable amounts of time and money, and a wonderful attitude.
Toddlers and preschoolers
Kidscraftweekly.com is run by Amber Carvan, another Australian crafting mom. Each project is simple, cheap, educational and fun.
The target ages are those of Amber’s children, Ella and Arky, aged 4 and 2, but Amber’s clear guidelines leave lots of room for variation. She points out difficulties for the younger ones and suggests adaptations, and sometimes documents the differences between, for instance, Arky's sky scape (at 15 months) and Ella's sky scape (at age 3).
Kidscraftweekly excels especially at showing what tiny to little fingers can do. It features step-by-step photographs of the project’s progress and the results.
Philosophy
Though most of the projects are simple, they deliver often stunning results that will delight both child and parent. Still, as Amber points out, “crafting with young kids is more often about the process than the outcome.”
Amber knows well the many advantages of regular crafting with kids. It
- gives the week added structure
- teaches children practical skills
- encourages them to think creatively
- gives them the opportunity to use their imagination,
- to learn from their mistakes
- receive plenty of praise and support from the ones they admire most (you!)
- means much needed “together time”
- and last but not least, is fun for kids and adults too
We couldn't agree more!
Newsletter
Kidscraftweekly is conveniently set up as a newsletter: you subscribe (using only an email address) and the beautifully made e-letter arrives in your mailbox every other Sunday. Or you can read each of these gems online. The online site also features additional articles.
There are 26 issues at the time of this writing. Each newsletter has a short, always interesting editorial addressing some aspect of children: crafting (of course), photographing with kids, gender stereotyping, kids and music, improvisation and pretend play, etc.
Themes and resources
Then follow several projects (usually 3-4), built around a single theme. Amber: “I've found that my kids seem to love the focus and sense of continuity that it provides. Also, from a learning perspective it reinforces key ideas and helps little minds to put two and two together”. Examples of themes are Wings, On the Farm, Jungle Animals, Food.
Just a grab:
The website features special resources, for instance on drawing with kids (“a number of ways that you can encourage kids to draw without showing them how”), how to display and store all those art works, and the essential toolbox. There is also a small, but growing library of printable project sheets.
There is also a wonderful photo gallery (via Flickr) with images, uploaded by moms and dads, of their kids crafting Kidscraftweekly projects.
Personality and approachability
Amber is very approachable, loves suggestions from readers and publishes them happily. There is little personal information: it’s all about the kids and the crafts. But often we catch a glimpse of a great sense of humor (when making a shaker: “Watch in horror as beans and pasta fly across the room. Clean up mess and re-apply lid, this time sealing it closed with glue or sticky tape”).
Traffic and (no) commercial content
The site is growing in popularity fast. At the moment more than 5000 people are signed up, and 50 more sign up each day. This is not counting “anonymous” internet traffic.
The site is ad free. Amber explains: “the last thing that we need is more crazy ads!”
For the moment she doesn’t sell anything, though in the near future there may be special, larger pdfs covering 10 to 12 to particular themes in more detail. These would cost a couple of dollars.
