What’s inside: This post is designed to inspire you with practical ideas and strategies for teaching handicraft to your kids. And you can download a free printable list of 90 ideas for handicraft.
Ultimate List of Handicraft Ideas
Do you need ideas for handicraft? Here are over 90 ideas to try with your kids in your handicraft time.
The simplest way to jump into handicraft as a subject in your homeschool is to pick one area for a semester. Then select 6 “projects” or end products that are useful and beautiful. But be careful—you have to stay within the child’s compass!
If you have older children, let them give input.
Remember to build skills as you go.
Before we jump to our ultimate list, here’s a bit of background if you need it.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, meaning that if you make a purchase after clicking through, SelfEducatingFamily will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Background
- What is handicraft? gives the basics of Charlotte Mason handicraft.
- Staying within the Compass shows 4 essential guidelines for handicraft and how to apply them.
- Teaching Life Skills to Your Kids: What should I teach? dives into the top 6 areas of life skills and 3 specific things to learn in each of those areas. These would make a good introductory semester if you selected from those lists.
- How to Train a Future Gardener gives tips and ideas for gardening as handicraft. “Work in the Garden” was one of Charlotte Mason’s schooling that came back year after year, so kids grew into their learning. If you do a little bit each year, you can do this too.
- Learning Woodworking shows the specific projects we did for an introductory semester with a group of homeschoolers.
- Dehydrating Madness also shows how you can manage a group of kids, this time focusing on a specific lesson from our Food Preservation handicraft one semester
Sloyd & Charlotte Mason Handicraft
Just remember these principles:
The points to be borne in mind in children’s handicrafts are: (a) that they should not be employed in making futilities such as pea and stick work, paper mats, and the like; (b) that they should be taught slowly and carefully what they are to do; (c) that slipshod work should not be allowed; (d) and that, therefore, the children’s work should be kept well within their compass.
Charlotte Mason Original Home School Series, Volume 1: Home Education, page 316
Sloyd generally applies to model making, and its principles agree. Slowly and carefully, teaching within the ability of the child’s skill, and building skills SLOWLY. The children gain a sense of accomplishment and competency by completing projects on their own.
Today: Teaching Handicraft to your kids
This question always comes up in handicraft: How can I teach it if I don’t like it? or I can’t do it? or I don’t know how myself?
Here’s where you exercise some humility and learn the handicraft yourself.
When Charlotte Mason incorporated Sloyd into her schools, she found that teachers who were trained in woodworking made better supervisors of handicraft than actual carpenters and craftsmen. I found that encouraging as we learned new handicrafts. They didn’t have to be expert craftsmen, they needed to be able to teach.
The hardest thing in actually teaching handicraft is stepping back and letting the children learn without lecturing or micromanaging.
Example
To demonstrate this concept of limiting your teaching lessons, here’s a good short video on how to make a crochet chain which I like for several reasons.
I like it because:
- She demonstrates how to do the stitch
- The end product is shown – a chain of stitches
- It’s easy enough to learn the skill and then build on it.
Using online resources is handy for you, but try not to rely on it too much – too much screen time is bad for kids!
Categories of Handicraft Ideas
Suppose you examined the subjects taught in the Charlotte Mason school in Ambleside, England. You would notice that the afternoons were spent with outdoor time, brush drawing, and “work.” “Work” seemed to include hand work, help in the house or garden, making gifts, sewing or mending, making charitable items of clothing, and later, first aid and making models of historical scenes related to their studies.
The classes also seemed to build and continue over time, repeated over semesters, with work on more than one project concurrently.
I’ve divided the “subject” of handicraft into 3 broad categories: Home Crafting, Gardening, and Sloyd or Model Making. I feel it is in the spirit of Charlotte Mason who said that “work” should be done in the afternoon along with outdoor time and brush drawing (a.k.a. nature journaling and learning dry brush technique).
Home Crafts
Home crafts can include anything related to maintaining and improving the home and the people in it, as well as gift-making and life skills. Cooking, sewing, mending, repairs, and such go in this category.
Garden Work
Nature study is a vital part of Charlotte Mason methods and often included “learn 6 plants” in a semester. The garden can be a source of nature study as well as handicraft. Most gardeners know it is best to visit the garden for 15 minutes a day rather than once a month. So we see that Nature study and “Work in the garden” are related to an extent.
And time in the garden can be spent observing as well as doing. That’s vital to both gardening and nature study. To watch how your garden changes each day. To identify and catch tiny weeds before they get big – these activities build your habit of observation, which is good for becoming a self-learner.
If you use each term to learn a little bit more, over time general knowledge of how to care for a garden becomes secondhand. Each day or week you learn one more plant, one more “weed,” or you ask yourself what does my tree look like in winter, what does a radish seedling look like compared to a marigold, is that a weed?
Garden work also overlaps with handicraft. Good starting hand crafts in the garden include seed starting, sprouting, flower pressing, and flower & vegetable gardening where the child picks one flower or one vegetable every year to learn to grow. More advanced handicraft for the garden would include building garden planters, mosaic foot tiles, weatherproof labels for herb gardens, and many other like items.
Sloyd or Model Making
Another aspect of handicraft was learning to make things. Models were often incorporated into schooling.
Sloyd, which is based on a Swedish word for hand craft and is also known as “Educational sloyd”, is a system of manual arts training developed in Sweden in the late 1800s. Charlotte Mason began to favor sloyd in her schools as the method for teaching handicraft to children.
Sloyd systematically teaches children the skills to produce increasingly complex models in paper, cardboard, wood, and other materials. As the children grow, they learn precision and care in producing each model.
A sloyd knife is one of the first tools young children learnto use in sloyd.
Charlotte Mason tested different ways to teach sloyd and settled into precision paper or cardboard models. A young child would learn their tools and how to cut carefully and precisely with a sloyd knife – making squares, then little boxes and other shapes.
The book used in her school was Paper Modelling by M. Swanell and is for the earliest forms. It is a good opening handicraft for kids.
Ultimate List of Handicraft Ideas
I’ve included everything I could think of in these lists. You may not think every one of these is worthy of being called a handicraft, but someone else might.
Let me give you an example: Duct tape models. There was a phase of our elementary school where duct tape creations were obsessively pursued. I suggested directing my twins’ efforts towards something we were learning about the civil war. After some time and industry, they produced floating models of the Monitor and the Merrimack. And the models were to scale and one had a swiveling turret. It was awesome.
So here are my gigantic lists broken into 3 general categories. You can skip to download the PDF if you like!
Home Crafts
- Animal care
- Auto mechanics & maintenance
- Baking
- Cake decorating
- Caning (chairs)
- Canning (food)
- Cooking
- CPR
- Crocheting
- Cross-stitch
- Embroidery
- First Aid
- Food Preservation & Storage
- Gifts in a Jar
- House maintenance & care
- Knitting
- Knot tying
- Latch-hook
- Loom weaving
- Macrame
- Mending
- Painting a room
- Plumbing
- Quilting
- Sewing
- Spinning fibers
- Weaving
- Weaving pot holders
- Welding
- Wiring (Electrical)
Garden Work
- Beneficial insects
- Biointensive gardening
- Composting
- Container gardening
- Drip irrigation
- Edible flowers
- Flower arranging
- Flower gardening
- Foraging
- Growing microgreens
- Growing sprouts
- Herb gardening
- Identifying “weeds”
- Lawn care
- Making tinctures
- Medicinal gardens
- Perennial edibles
- Permaculture
- Pressing flowers
- Pruning
- Re-potting plants
- Soil studies
- Square foot gardening
- Starting seeds
- Transplanting
- Tree & shrub care
- Tree identification
- Vegetable gardening
- Wood chip gardening
- Yard Maintenance
Sloyd & Model Making
- Airplane folding
- Beading
- Cardboard sloyd
- Carving
- Ceramics
- Clay sculpture
- Collage
- Decoupage
- Duct tape creations
- Iron sculpture
- Jewelry making
- Kite making
- Leatherwork
- Lego mechanics
- Metalworking
- Mosaics
- Origami
- Painting Miniatures
- Paper sloyd
- Picture framing
- Pottery
- Quilling
- Robotics
- Rubber stamping
- Scrapbooking
- Scroll sawing
- Sculpting
- Whittling
- Wood burning
- Wood sloyd
- Woodworking
FAQ
Handicraft is an area to work in year after year. Most families I know selected one thing to learn in a semester. So try picking one thing. If you are familiar with something and your kids aren’t, then start there. If you don’t know how to do anything yourself, then pick something you think your family would enjoy. The folks at Raising Real Men have some nice “Craftsman Crates” kits out there if you want an all-in-one solution which is great for beginners. That’s not an affiliate, I just think their crates are nice. At the very least, they give you an idea of what can be done at a beginner level.
If you are starting with Form 1 kids, you might want to start with Paper Modelling.
Examples of handicraft fall into 3 general categories: 1. Home crafts, like cooking, sewing, home maintainance, and many others. 2. Garden Crafting, which can run from growing things in the garden to flower pressing. 3: Sloyd or Model Making, which can include paper or cardboard models, woodworking, ceramics, and others.
The best way to learn handicraft is to start small and build skills over time.
Freebie
Would you like this Ultimate List of Handicraft Ideas in a convenient printable? You can come back to it every year in your homeschool planning if you put a copy in your homeschool binder.
Remember
Parting words: build skills slowly over time. Not every handicraft is going to be loved by every child. But you never know what will take hold of the child’s imagination.
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