Teaching children about crafting is a good way to help them learn about their world. Through crafts, they can learn about the elements, nature or a particular member of the pagan pantheon. Crafts are a good way to help bored children focus, as well as an enjoyable way to spend time. The resulting item can be used in a ceremony or kept to enjoy long after the making.
Basics
Go to yard sales and thrift shops to find all kinds of bargain crafting items and tools. Set up an area to keep craft items handy, such as paints, glues, buttons, beads, yarns, felt, cookie cutters, candle-making items and scissors. Keep shoe boxes or containers for sorting and organizing and label them so that you can find something quickly. Buy some plain white sheets or use old ones cut into strips for painting and stamping. Keep a bolt of inexpensive white fabric on hand, too. You can get these when they go on sale at fabric shops. Stamps of various kinds, such as letters, flowers, birds or trees also come in handy.
Clay, Wood, Paper and Felt
These four common items are great for making pagan crafts. Shape and dry or kiln-fire clay offering bowls to burn incense or hold water. Build totem animals from clay or wood. Mold the Green Man or the Goddess. Cut images from magazines that reflect the four elements--earth, air, water and fire--and use them to create a collage. Or make a poster from pieces of colored construction paper for each element. You can use puffy paint to draw pagan symbols such as the wheel of the year on felt to make prayer flags. Let the kids add personal touches with items such as beads, sequins or feathers.
A Child's Altar
You want your child to learn about love and divinity and honoring the universal commonalities in pagan faiths. Select a small area indoors where he can have an altar of his own. Help him make an altar with a crate or a board or slab of rock held up by bricks. This will become his own focus center for keeping sacred objects and for ceremonial or other purposes. Let him choose his own objects and images to keep on it.
Greens and Nature
Show children how to extract essential oils from such plants as lavender to use in candles you help them make by hand. Take a walk in a wooded area and gather ferns, wildflowers, ivy and other greens. Use florist's wire to shape them into crowns and wreaths for seasonal rites and decorate them with ribbons. Teach land, sea and sky concepts by having kids observe insects, birds and sacred trees. They can draw draw these to accompany the words in a hand-made book of shadows.
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