How to Plan a Kid's Craft Exchange
May 27, 2012
I love them because I know crafting fosters creativity, helps build their dexterity and motor function and is very important for their imagination.
However, I hate/strongly dislike kid's crafts because they take time to plan, can be messy and my first born high control nature generally gets the best of me when Nora does a craft different than how I would do a craft (how dare her? Right!?).
Thankfully I have genius friends (yes... being genius is a pre-requisite for being my friend) who come up with incredible ideas like doing a Kid's Craft Exchange. (Thanks Amy!)
Here's how you too can plan/host a Kid's Craft Exchange.
How to Plan a Kid's Craft Exchange
1. Invite 10-12 friends that have child(ren) roughly around the same age as your child(ren). This is important to note because kid's crafts do need to be age appropriate.
2. Determine how to communicate with your newly formed "Kid's Craft Exchange Club." In our case, our club facilitator set up a private Facebook Group where everyone was able to communicate about scheduling and specific craft questions and thoughts. You could also do this through email.
3. Schedule your first meeting. We decided to meet for a couple of hours on a weeknight. We made our gathering a "Mom's Night Out" and the host served wine and sweets.
We're planning on meeting every couple months or so until we decide otherwise.
4. Choose your craft and make enough of that craft kit for each child represented in your club. So the idea of this club is that you think of one craft idea per meeting, buy all of the items necessary to assemble the craft kit and make a kit for every child represented in your group.
In our group we had 10 moms attend. 8 of the moms had one crafting child and 2 had two crafting children. So all 10 moms made 12 kits (8+4 kids).
Note :: The reason I say "child represented", rather than "mom represented" is because you need to take into consideration how many children each mom has in the group. In my case I only needed one of each craft because Elsie is too little for crafts. However, in a year or so I'll have two crafting girlies.
5. Attend the first meeting with your crafting kits in hand to exchange for more kits. At your meeting, each mom in attendance will be given a couple minutes to explain the craft she brought and pass the kits out to each mom in attendance.
You'll leave each meeting with a box full of pre-planned crafts for your kiddos.
Take it from me. It. Is. Amazing!!
Questions? Comment below.
Happy Crafting! Read more...
