When you love a hobby or activity so much, you long to share it with your friends, family and anyone else who will listen. I have spoken to more than one scrapbooker, who has been dreaming of the day their preschooler would be old enough to enjoy scrapbooking.
Well, a preschooler is old enough to enjoy scrapbooking. If you can teach your child to hold a pair of scissors correctly, and you use a child safe pair of scissors, you can enjoy scrapbooking with your child. Teaching your child to express their own creativity at this young and impressionable age, is important. What better way to do that, than through the love of your own hobby and preserving even more of their childhood.
Tips for Scrapbooking with your preschooler:
- Keep safety first. Remember that your preschooler is curious, inquisitive and not very coordinated. They won’t be able to use anything hot, anything requiring blades or anything requiring a lot of force.
- Use only the basics. Although your preschooler might whine that they really want to use your punches or your favorite embellishments, explain that when you are just getting started, you use only the basics. Supply them with a colorful array of card stock, a pair of child safe scissors, adhesive of some kind, and a nice variety of stickers that you aren’t concerned about.
- Teach and then back away. Show your child how to crop things they might not want in the photographs. You can even show them how to mat their photographs, if they want to. But allow them full creativity. If they snip a photograph the wrong way, encourage them to use it anyway. It’s about learning at this stage.
More helpful tips will be offered tomorrow for scrapbooking with your preschooler, and throughout the next few days I will be adding articles dealing with various ages, and how you can help them develop a love of scrapbooking and teaching them to express themselves with total creativity.