Hermenautic Circle blog

Shoes in pink (approx. 9" X 9")



Shoes in red (approx. 9" X 9")




Bra in blue (approx. 9" X 11")



Bra in white (approx. 9" X 11")



Bra in fusible ivory (approx. 9" X 11")




Girdle in fusible ivory (approx. 7" X 7")



Girdle in wispy white (approx. 7" X 7")



Wires #4 in blue (approx. 12" X 9")



Wires #4 in amber (approx. 12" X 9")




Wires #3 in blue (approx. 13" X 10")



Wires #1 in clear seedy glass (approx. 9" X 11")



Wires #1 in blue seedy glass and amber water glass (approx. 9" X 11")

Two words: They suck.

Forgive the harsh language, but I really find most crafts for preschool-age children not just gag-inducing, but developmentally questionable.

Whether it's making little bugs out of pipe cleaners and egg cartons, gluing cotton balls on Santa's beard, or adding decorations to a cut-out animal, preschool crafts always seem to be about nudging children to mimic or embellish something an adult has made.

Even in the most non-judgmental, non-pressured settings, such projects are more about competency -- the ability to place those cotton balls in just the right place -- than they are about creativity. They're often either so easy and unimaginative that they amount to dreary busy work for wee ones, or else require children to do things that are well above their skill level (meaning lots of "help" from adults).

Oh, and the projects are usually really lame.

Don't get me wrong: I love doing crafts. I made all kinds of wacky jewelry in my 20s, created elaborate scrapbooks in my 30s, and now enjoy unwinding in the evening by making altered clothes for my kids.

I just don't think there are many crafts that are appropriate for two-, three-, and four-year-old kids. (Readers, feel free to weigh in -- and, by all means, share any ideas you have for non-sucky, genuinely creative little-kid crafts.)

Kids in this age group are better off doing art instead of crafts: open-ended creation, in which there is no model to copy or modify, no right or wrong. They need lots of time and space to explore different materials and media, scribble and smear, combine and remix, generally mess around -- and use their own imagination to describe what they are creating.

There will be plenty of time, later, for cute creations, if your child is interested in such things. In early childhood, it strikes me as more important to nurture the sense of open-ended exploration that art provides.

Bathtub painting ranks high on my list of all-time best activities for toddlers and preschoolers. The idea is simple and brilliant: Soap-based paint enables your kid to be messy and get clean all at the same time.

There are companies that sell such paints, but don't bother buying them. You can make your own for pennies, using my foolproof and wonderfully imprecise recipe:

1. Combine liquid soap with a roughly equivalent amount of cornstarch; mix until smooth.
2. Pour into muffin tins or other small containers, then use a couple of drops of food coloring to create the paint colors you want.

This stuff is going on the skin of your precious little darling, so use something mild and reasonably free of carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, and sundry other scary toxins (you'd be surprised what's in seemingly innocuous products like Johnson & Johnson's Baby Bath).

The mixture is great for fingerpainting, if that's something your child enjoys. My kids are mysteriously fastidious about having paint on their hands, which I understand is fairly common among toddlers, so I usually give them brushes or sponges to use.

Your child will likely paint the bathtub walls and every accessible inch of his or her body (no, honey, you really shouldn't put paint in there). And most miraculously, from the parent's point of view, when you rinse everything off at the end, you will not only have given your child a great artistic and sensory experience: you will have cleaned the bathtub.

We got a nice new stack of books today from the awesome Brooklyn Public Library, and while we were looking at one this evening -- I Spy Shapes in Art by Lucy Micklethwait -- I had a humiliating realization: My kids, who turned three this past weekend, don't know their shapes.

Let me not overdramatize: Both children know what a circle is, and can identify triangles and rectangles. But Nini was disturbingly vague on the question of squares, and neither she nor Desmond could identify a diamond or an oval.

I was quite mortified, and realized that we haven't really looked at shape books since they were too young to actually grasp what they were being shown. (You know, the stage where "digesting" a book means literally gumming it.) We used to play with some felt-board shape creatures I made more than a year ago, but they've languished in the closet for months. And somehow shapes haven't made it into our everyday conversation when we're out and about in the world.

I do think this amounts to some pretty lame home preschooling on my part, but upon reflection, I'm not as distressed by this learning gap as I was initially. I intend to draw their attention to shapes in the coming days, re-read the Shapes in Art book with them, maybe find some other shape books to read together (suggestions, anyone, for something not too babyish?). I have great confidence they will learn the ones they don't know quickly.

I also think that, once you get past grasping the basic concept of shapes, learning additional ones is essentially just learning information (at least until you reach the point of bringing mathematics in). They'll have a lifetime to accumulate facts, and the Internet to search when they want to know more, or have forgotten what they once knew.

At this age, I think it's most crucial to support their innate love of learning, to encourage a questioning spirit and nurture the skill of asking good questions, to give them time and space to explore and experiment. Some stressed-out, flashcard-wielding parents might be horrified by my laxity, but learning information strikes me as one of the least important things for young children to do.

Or perhaps I should say "little muddy thumbs"....

My twins and I have spent a lot of the last week or so working and playing in the garden: planting seeds and annuals, adding compost to the soil, mulching, making glorious mudheaps with the garden hose.

What better toddler activity could there be than gardening? Fresh air, freedom, beauty, dirt; the chance to make things grow and begin to divine something about the mystery of life. Given the chance, children respond powerfully and viscerally to the first signs of spring, to the magic of sprouting seeds and blossoming flowers.

You don't need a garden to share this magic with your child. Until recently, we lived in a seventh-story one-bedroom apartment in the frenzied midst of Midtown Manhattan; I'm sorry to say I didn't grow a thing with my kids last year.

Now I know that even if you have no natural light whatsoever, you can get a packet of watercress seeds and sprout them on some damp cotton balls in a dark, cool cupboard. If you have one window that gets decent light, you can try sprouting sunflower seeds or growing radishes or herbs. So what if your plant doesn't grow to maturity: The main delight for kids comes in that first unfurling of the initial shoot, the spreading of the first seed leaves.

If you're lucky enough to have some outdoor space, you can plant things in containers, or if you're really lucky, plant right in the ground. If you want the experience to be rich and satisfying for your child, let go of any Martha Stewart aspirations: Your basic three-year-old, however good-intentioned, will end up mangling the tender sunflower seedlings, drowning the crocuses with the hose, trampling the pansies, and squishing the hostas.

That's OK. (OK, it's not, but try to grit your teeth and accept a measure of gleeful kiddie destruction.) The most important thing for your child to get out of preschool-age gardening is a sense of joyful connection to the natural world, and an incipient sense of how human activity affects nature. If you actually grow some pretty flowers or some tasty vegetables, consider it a major bonus.