Craft Journal

This activity helps a child not only keep track of their lives, but it feeds their creative side and helps to keep all their art in one place. This project is one part journal, one part scrap book, and 2 parts creativity.

This is a great way to have a pre-literate child keep track of their day. They can draw, paint, cut out papers, paste in leaves, and other things. When you go on walks let them pick of leaves to do fun things with, or cut out things that they saw from construction paper, like flowers, birds, ect. If you go to movies or the zoo, save the tickets from this.

What you will need: 3 Ring Binder(I sugest at lease 3 in as some pages will be thicker), 3 hole punch, tape, glue, safety scissors, contsruction paper, and printer paper (since its $3.00 for 500 sheets) crayons, markers, paints, the normal crafting materials.

How to:

• hole punch several pieces of printer paper (or you can punch them each time you add a page)
• help child choose type of craft (paint, marker, cut out, ect) and then start on the project.
• Example: Today we went on a nature walk and Sam chose to bring home souveniers. He wanted to make a tree with them, so on today's paper I drew a tree and Sam placed his leaves and I taped them down, then he placed his flowers and I taped them down. And then he chose to draw houses we saw on our walk in one corner .
• Talk with your child (if they are not old enough to do it by themselves) to see what they want their art to look like. If they want to have you cut shapes for them to paste, or if they want to finger paint, or draw what they saw that day. Remember if there is paint or glue involved allow it to dry before placing it in the binder.
• The most important part of this is simply to have fun doing it and to let your child go through what they've made and remember the great days they had!