Preschool Crafts a Waste of Time?

In her article, "Why Typical Preschool Crafts Are a Total Waste of Time" in Science of Us, Melissa Dahl discusses insights from the book by Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little, regarding the mindlessness of common preschool craft projects:

"Christakis's objections, to which she devotes an entire chapter of her book, are about these kinds of preschool crafts as a whole: the cotton-ball snowman, the paper-plate Easter bunny, even the perennial classic Thanksgiving hand-turkey.  These activities, she argues, place too much emphasis on the product — in this case, something to hang on Mom and Dad's refrigerator — and too little emphasis on the creative process.  Kids at this developmental stage benefit from messing around with paints, or clay, or crayons; they gain little, on the other hand, from assembling together some construction paper shapes that their teachers cut out ahead of time....

"There are some equally important developmental markers — social and emotional skills, for example — that are overlooked entirely by the hand-turkey activity and others like it.  If you listen for it, Christakis says, signs of this kind of development are evident in 'the kind of really rich, expressive language that emerges when children are engaged in creative work, like building a fort or playing house with other children.  In contrast, that kind of self-expression doesn’t happen during a more by-the-numbers 'creative' activity, the research suggests.  As a consequence, 'we have very little sense of these young souls who are doggedly making turkeys,' Christakis writes.  'Whether it’s turkeys or rodents, there is so rarely a sense of a real child, in a real place, attached to any of the institutional paraphernalia affixed, with pride, on people's walls.'

"A better way to go about art projects for this age group, she argues, is... placing more emphasis on teaching children skills and less on having it all result in some tangible creation that can be dropped into a backpack at the end of the day.  Instead of giving kids a project of making a sunflower out of a paper plate and premixed paint, for instance, what if preschools took the time to give them real instruction in how to use real art materials, like clay?  Christakis, herself, was skeptical of whether this could actually be worth the effort when she had her own classroom, but she’s since changed her mind.  Imagine what could happen, she writes, if a teacher would instruct her class how to actually use clay — how to shape it, how to change it with the use of more or less water, how to keep it from drying out by storing it properly."

Contributed by Zvia Dover

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