Growing Futures Learning Center

Magna tiles are so fun on our little DIY light table!

Getting outside daily is so important for our bodies and minds! The benefits are endless! Aside from the obvious motor development, playing outside also supports mental health by reducing anxiety and depression. Get outside today! Even if it's just for 10 minutes!

Hands, cups or dinosaurs, squishing playdough is so much fun! Exploring with playdough helps to develop fine motor skills and strengthens the muscles in our hands! Not to mention it promotes creativity and imagination!

Steggy the fine motor dinosaur does more than help refine those fine motor skills! He also helps develop hand-eye coordination, color recognition, logical thinking and counting skills!

When we work together, we can make something beautiful 😍🎨🌈

Painting with water is so much fun!

We have the cutest little office assistants 🥰

We love looking at books and hearing stories!

Racing cars down the slides on this beautiful day!

We love doing process art! We do some product art but the vast majority of our art is process! It is so amazing to see the different personalities and styles come out in these little guys!

On the topic of process art vs product art.

“Product” art is like— doing a craft. There’s supposed to be a set result and everybody’s is supposed to look a set way. Sometimes I hear arguments for the positive side of product art in terms of teaching children specific fine motor skills; i.e., if everybody has to cut out their project in exactly the same way, then they work on cutting, or things like that. Sure, I can see an argument to be made there. I’m not saying crafts are evil. They’re fine. I loved crafts when I was a kid.

“Process” art is what young children (toddlers, preschoolers, early elementary) are drawn to if they’re not interfered with, though. They aren’t thinking about what the end result will look like when they set out—not if they haven’t been acted upon by an adult or other outside force! They might explore the way colors mix on the paper, they might pretend the pencil is a car zooming around the page, they might try to put stickers on the page and then take them back off to see what happens. They might mix materials in creative ways—stick stickers onto wet paint; squeeze out huge globs of liquid glue; try to color on the liquid glue with markers to see what happens. The focus is on the process.

I honestly find process art perfectly sufficient for learning new fine motor techniques too. Kids, in my experience, have just as much fun (if not more) and learn just as much (if not more) using the scissors to cut out whatever they’re imagining or processing or whatever weird material I’ve set in front of them — leaves from outside, wet noodles, dry noodles, straws, paper scraps — as they do cutting out a set craft material.

“What about waste?” people commonly ask me. “You say that you let kids learn how to glue by just squeezing out glue and not telling them any different, but isn’t that wasteful?”

Play is learning, and learning isn’t wasteful. It’s OK to preemptively only set out what materials you’re OK with them using all of. Put half the bottle of glue away, in a different container, to be returned to the white bottle after you’re done; or put only a bit of it out, in a cup with a paintbrush, or mix it with a bit of water or paint to stretch it, or involve the child in the exploring.

Ask yourself before entering into an art/play exploration: what would I be okay with them literally using one hundred percent of? Only give them access to that much of everything. Kids can be creative within limitations — some of the best art comes from working within boundaries!

[Image description: Six pieces of artwork, each made with what looks like watercolour paint but each one extremely different. One appears to show a butterfly, one shows something like the outline of an elephant, a few look like they have exploration of square-shaped stamps involved, and one looks like an exploration of color mixing. The caption says, “You know you’re doing it right when no two pieces of children’s work look the same.” The image was made by Cuddlebug Kids whose handle is also on the image. End description.]

Today concludes both Christmas and Hanukkah and begins Kwanzaa! Kwanzaa is an annual celebration of African-American culture from December 26 to January 1, culminating in a communal feast called Karamu, usually on the sixth day. It was created by activist Maulana Karenga, based on African harvest festival traditions from various parts of West and Southeast Africa.

Happy Kwanzaa friends!

Hanukkah Fact #8

Hanukkah is not the most important Jewish holiday. Jewish holidays like Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover are actually much more significant to the religion. Hanukkah is considered a minor festival.