Making a Papoose: Arts & Crafts Projects for Kids

Video Transcript

" Hi! I am Debbie with Expert Village.com and we are here today to talk about more fun crafts you can do with your young leaner. Today we are talking about Thanksgiving activities you can do, to get ready to talk about the first Thanksgiving. We have done headbands, we have done Indian beads, we have done loincloth for the boys and now we are going to do the cradleboard with a papoose for the girls. The materials you are going to need to put this little cradle board together; you are going to need some craft paper from your local discount store, grocery store, drug store; anybody has this or you can use a grocery bag. You are going to need some yarn; I like brown, because it looks more natural. You need a hole puncher, you need scissors with some kind of a marker, crayons, some tape, a stapler, and some brown temper paint that has been watered down with a brush of some sort. First thing we are going to do, you will need to draw off your pattern for your cradleboard; it’s a basic oval type shape, a little wider at the top than it is at the bottom, you will need two sides, we are going to fold it down, and then we are going to staple it, so it should like that and I would do this for your child so you can kind of space out the holes, kind of basically between the staples that you do. Then we are going to draw our Native American symbols on it. Again your child is going to use their creativity and what you have told them about Native Americans and how they communicated with each other, so remind then that they need to draw cart in dark, do rainbow; girls usually like to get fancy, and put some flowers, any kind of symbol that happen in nature, the Native Americans were drawing about it, and their language, their picture language. After they get it the way they want it, then we are going to do our paint wash again, get your brown temper paint, and then we are going to soothe the wash and they love this part. Talk about how you need to spread it out; you don’t want to make it too wet with the whole thing covered and then find a place for it to dry. We will set it over here. Now we need a papoose to go in that cradleboard, so while that is drying you can just draw off on some tag board or vanilla paper a basic shape of a doll, and then let your little girl design her clothing. This is the one the I happened to have run off but they can design their own clothing and draw face with a marker. Then you are going to bring the cradleboard back and we are going to let your little Native American do some sewing, so you need some yarn. If you make it little bit easier, get a piece of a masking tape and we talk about how this is our pretend needle, probably a deer or a buffalo bone that the Native American women made to do their sewing. Just kind of make it into a little point and we are going to start at the top; bring it through the top layer. The child may need some help on this depending on how old they are and I’m just going to take that off, right there, and then we talk about doing the over and under weaving, so we have come up and now we are going to go down. So you go down, pull the string all the way through, so it doesn’t get tangled up. Now come back through; lots of good eye-hand coordination here. At the end of weaving we are going to again tape it off, so that your little girl can put this around her neck and wear it on her back or her side like the Native American women did."