Arts and Crafts- Tips and Advice: My Family Tree

by Wai Chong Mak
(Singapore)

FeedTheVillage.com - Tips and Advice: My Family Tree

Family Tree helps a family to develop a sense of belonging and identity in the family. It assists the family members to get involved in searching for their favourite pictures, cutting of the fruits and leaves of a tree for decoration. It promotes the connection within the family members. It is memorable for the children when they grow up.

Family tree arts and crafts work needs art papers to make a tree trunk with fruits. It requires pictures of family members for pasting on the fruits of the tree. The individual photos and their photos with daddy and mummy, the pictures of grandparents are needed for pasting and putting up for decoration in the family tree. Glue is used for pasting activities.

Through this activity, the children will get to know more about their family origin. They will get interested to find out more about their grandparents, uncles, auntie and relatives. It motivates them to communicate with them and strengthen relationship with their relatives.

It is an excellent way to discuss with the children about your family value. After family discussion, they may find out that their own family values (e.g. love, honesty, care and so on). We ask the children what is our family different from other families. We may ask our children whether they are proud of our family and family value. We can also write down our family value and paste it on the family tree.

In addition, we can discuss with our children about the strengths of our family as a whole and individual member. We affirm each family member for their unique contribution to the family. It needs to be as concrete as possible. For instance, my second son said, "I recognise my mummy because you help to take care of our family members. I appreciate my brother because he teaches me how to do my homework." Affirmation helps to recognize the contribution of everyone in the family, it helps to strengthen the family bond.

I suggest that this arts and crafts work can be done during holidays as it takes some time for the children to gather information, photos and pictures for the family members. When we are with the family members to do the work together, our children feel important and are motivated to do the arts and crafts work together. Spend our valuable time with our children and do the work together. You will enjoy the fruit of togetherness and connectedness with our children. We encourage them to use their creativity to design the family tree. We appreciate their effort in contributing to the art work. Our children will be proud of their work when we frame their masterpiece up.