Interactive crafts 1

We tried making interactive crafts with our foster children in Kratie.  When you pull the string, something pops out from the top, or the cover opens.  Once you understand how the mechanism works, you'll understand why the card moves the way it does.  We don't use such mechanisms very often in our daily lives, though.  And that is especially true for children in rural areas.  However, if they are open to learning, they will find plenty of opportunities to apply what they have learned.  This program was once again intended to provide the children with the discovery that "such things are possible!"

The 1st craft has a pulley-like structure where pulling one side lifts the other.  If you're used to paper crafts, it's not a particularly difficult process.  But as they don't usually do crafts, it seemed like a lot of work for them: measuring with a ruler, recognizing what to make with which paper, which part of the paper to be folded, and which part to stick where...  It must have been a very stimulating... or even exhausting time for most of the children, as they used their minds and hands in something very different from usual.

Children will be very disappointed if they put in all that effort to complete a craft and the mechanism doesn't work well.  We wanted to avoid them ending up with nothing, not having learned anything.  When their crafts didn't work properly, our staff worked with children to find out what the problem was and solved it together. 

Specifically, we created a craft in which a picture would pop out from cracker-like parts.  Thinking of what to pop out was the only aspect that allowed the children to express their playfulness in this first craft program.  We used a cat to pop out as the sample, so there were a lot of cat and dog drawings, while there were also all kinds of other things made, like diamonds, butterflies, hearts, and favorite cartoon characters.