India Crafts for Kids

In our unit study on India this summer, we spent a couple weeks exploring Hindu holidays as well as the animals that live in India.  The kids (ages 5, 5, and 3) had a wonderful time making a variety of crafts...

 

We found this India-inspired bird craft online.  All three children enjoyed decorating their birds with paint dots using cotton swabs instead of paint brushes.  I cut out the bird shape for H (3 years old), but the twins made their own.  I love how different each one is.

We read the story of Prince Siddhartha (who ran away to search for a way to end suffering and became Buddha).  The lotus flower represents rising above the murky water to achieve spiritual enlightenment.  The girls cut out pink petals from construction paper and assembled their own lotus flowers.

Another symbol of Buddhism is mandala art.  We used Mandala Designer Junior (which we already had) to make our own mandalas.

Mandalas also gave us an opportunity to learn about symmetry and geometry (degrees of a circle and fractions).

The girls also made their own Rangoli designs (Hindu art usually drawn on floors or sidewalks) using dot paper... another lesson in symmetry.

The kids also learned some yoga moves in our study of India.  They are watching Cosmic Kids Yoga (free on YouTube).  We've continued incorporating yoga into our schooldays and the children love it!

I checked out a number of books about India from the library, and this inspired the kids.  Above is one of L's journal entries.

The kids and I spent some time learning about animals that live in India.  I read aloud The Jungle Book and the girls read Magic Tree House #19:  Tigers at Twilight independently.  After researching pythons and cobras, the kids made their own pop-up snake cards...

.. and peacocks with glitter glue.  They also wrote daily in their journals about the animals we were studying (langur monkeys, tigers, elephants, rhinos, etc..).

Recently when we were reading about the Gupta dynasty and about the Buddhist monks who constructed the Ajanta caves in Story of the World Volume 2 (The Middle Ages), the kids could find India on the map and recalled what we had previously learned about India.  They asked if we could make more crafts, of course.