Craft&Code kits
help your child’s practical and emotional
development
Below we’ve listed out the skills your child can develop through the activities in our kits. Pay particular attention to those activities where your child may be experiencing some difficulties – your help and encouragement can make a big difference. Call out the successes, too – when you praise your child for doing a specific task well, you’re helping build their confidence to try other new things.
Assembling and setting up
active
attention
manual
dexterity
spatial
thinking
perception
(analyzing,
comparing)
sense of
purpose
Decorating and playing
creativity
imagination
self-
expression
manual
dexterity
Connecting to a laptop
asking for
help
computer
skills
Coding
creativity
logical
thinking
detailed
planning
curiosity
algorithmic
thinking
Helping a child to complete a task can be done different ways, and does not always mean that the parent should do everything instead of the child or together with the child. Here are the suggested levels of help – start at the first level and, only if it does not help, move on to the next.
- Suggest sitting close to or next to each other.
- Comment on individual successful steps of the child, as specifically as possible: “Wow, you’ve bent the lines so carefully!”, “Great, you’ve followed the instruction very carefully!”
- Support mistakes and failures: “You can try again,” “Yes, this is a difficult task, it may not work the first time”, “I feel for you, it’s sad that it didn’t work out”
How to help organize the child’s activities.
- Suggest the child organize their work space the way they want, with enough room and good lighting.
- Remind the child to read the instructions from start to finish, and move from one point to the next in the right order.
- It may be helpful to first read the entire instruction together, discuss any difficult parts, and only then leave the child to work independently.
- Try to make sure the room is calm and quiet (turn off the TV, take any younger siblings to another room). It might also help to play some calm music.
- Show the child at what point failure occurred and discuss what might be the reason. Suggest what the child might change to have a better chance of success: work slower/faster, press harder, fold more carefully, read more carefully, etc.
There is nothing wrong with helping a child to do some particularly difficult tasks.
- Ask the child in a gentle manner: “What exactly is it that you can’t get right?”, “Which step can I help you with?”
- If you do something for the child, show and explain exactly what you are doing so the child understands what constitutes success. Then let the child repeat your actions – this will ensure they will remember and do the same next time.
- If possible, show the child the action, and then replace everything back to the starting point and ask the child to complete the action again on their own.
- Being able to ask for specific help is a very useful skill for anyone to learn 😊
IMPORTANT! If the child gets upset at any point: screaming, fighting, throwing a toy and not willing to continue – this is normal, but there’s little point in continuing with the task when this happens. You may need to take a break. Have a cup of tea, take a nap, go for a walk, play ball, or read a book together. Return to the task later, when you’re both in a calm mood, and help the child work through what exactly did not work the last time.
Is that really bad? We don’t think so.
Any new activity by the child develops according to this logic:
Joint activities → shared activities → independent activities.
No matter whether it’s brushing teeth or solving mathematical tasks.
You can use the collaborative activities method with a school-age child. This means that an adult does some parts of the task while the child performs others. How can you do this so that child learns and will be able to do the next task themselves?
- Make sure you both start off in a good place (no bad moods allowed).
- Explain your actions.
- Let the child do things as much as possible by themselves, but be available to prompt and help.
- Acknowledge all the things the child did well in the process.