Making a Beaded Necklace: Arts & Crafts Projects for Kids

Video Transcript

" Hi! I am Debbie with Expert Village.com and I am here today to show you some really fun ways to work on not only fine motor skills, you can work on maths skills, counting, patterning, anything you can think of and you can tie this in with your Thanksgiving learning with your young learner on the types of jewelery that the Native Americans wore and what they might wear to their first thanksgiving. This happens to be a thanksgiving activity that they were working on today, but again it can be anytime, anywhere a great fine motor eye-hand coordination activity. What you will need at your local craft store you can buy, this one happens to be made with the plastic type string, which works great. This is the leather, more authentic looking type of string. I like this one a little bit better because when you are talking about the Native Americans they used animal skin, they used the different parts of the animals to make their clothing and make their jewelery, and so this one looks just a little more authentic. Not to mention the slick string is a little hard for the little ones, they will get all their beads on and then let go of it and they will all fly off. This one they stay on a little bit better so it is a little less frustrating for the little ones. First of all, you are going to need also some beads from your local craft store. First I talked to my kids that Native American didn’t have plastic beads from the craft store. They used shells and they used animal bones and things like that to make their jewelery, they dyed it different colors to make it colorful. We are pretending and we are using our beads. As part of your math instruction for the day, if you are so inclined, we talk about making a patten and making a plan before they make their necklace. So what I have my children do, first of all, put their beads in a divided dish, they are not going to get mixed up and they are not going to spill, ask your child, how they want to design their necklace and it is completely up to them. You can talk about the kind of pattern you want to make, so we can first make our pattern, I am going to do three reds, two blacks, three yellows and there is my pattern. Now I ask my child to repeat that pattern, so what would come next; three reds, two blacks, and three yellows, so that pattern would repeat itself, and I would have my child to make the pattern probably about the length of this mat, you don’t want it too long, and we would continuing repeating the pattern. Then when we get our string and the beauty of this string is that your beads are not going to fall off and again those fine motor skills are working, working, working. Their eye-hand coordination getting the bead on the string is such a great activity for young kids. So they would continue beading until they got all their beads on, and we would tie it up, and they would have a beautiful necklace for girls or boys because we know the Native American men wear lots of jewelery as well, and you could end up in something like this."