Kids' Craft Ideas - Growing Your Own Balloon Garden

Crafts will always be a very important teaching tool for anyone teaching little kids. Kids learn best by "doing." Homeschoolers and especially Unschoolers can use this balloon craft as part of a biology lesson. This is a wonderful kids' craft idea, that is fun and easy to do and also a great first lesson about plants. This craft use balloons so watch the little ones, while you are doing this craft, to prevent suffocation!

All you need for this kids' craft idea is a medium or large sized, clear balloon, a little earth and water, some seeds, a small funnel and a piece of string. Radish seeds work well, but you could use almost any seeds that are easy to grow.

Kid's Craft Ideas Step by Step - How to make your first balloon garden

1. Don't blow your balloon up yet! Put the mouth of the balloon over the funnel and hold it firmly in place (this is where an extra pair of adult hands comes in useful!) Tip in around a ½ cup of earth - enough to almost fill the deflated balloon.

2. Now gradually add water, via the funnel again, until the earth is wet through. Don't put too much water in or it will all just turn to mud and start overflowing!

3. Dry your funnel, then add your final ingredients, the seeds, into the balloon, still holding it firmly in its upside down position.

4. Still holding the balloon upside down, so that you don't get a mouthful of dirt, carefully blow it up.

5. Tightly make a knot in the top of the balloon, then tie your string around it and use the string to hook the balloon garden up near a window or other well-lit place.

Making balloon gardens is a fun thing to do at birthday parties, and will keep the kids occupied and happy for ages - as long as you don't mind the mess! On a summer's day, it's best done in the backyard.

Balloon gardens also make lovely gifts, the children can make them for an adult friend or relative and the recipient will be delighted - especially when they hang the balloon garden up and it grows green and lush.

Grandmothers and grandfathers especially love this kid's craft idea - either to do with the kids (especially a granddad who is a gardening enthusiast) or just to receive a balloon garden craft as a gift. They will love that the kids will want to keep coming back to visit them and seeing how their balloon garden is growing.

When the balloon garden slowly dies off, it is a good opportunity to explain to your kids about the cycle of life, and to help them make a new balloon garden! Use this opportunity to teach them a variety of facts about nature, not only the cycle of life. Plants need water, fresh air, good soil etc. to grow. You can also work a lesson about seasons into this craft.

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Arts and Crafts: Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman

Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman continues an argument begun in the 19th century, when writers such as John Ruskin and William Morris extolled the crafts remembered in our surnames (Smith, Cartwright, Thatcher, Mason, Fletcher) while lamenting the mind-numbing and soul-destroying labour of the industrial process which was replacing them. A long line of thinkers, from Hegel and Marx to Sennett’s teacher Hannah Arendt, have sympathised with the argument. But Sennett does not think that craftsmanship has vanished from our world. On the contrary: it has merely migrated to other regions of human enterprise, so that the delicate form of skilled cooperation that once produced a cathedral now produces the Linux software system. Linux, for Sennett, is the work of a community of craftsmen “who embody some of the elements first celebrated in the (Homeric) Hymn to Hephaestus”.

The quotation illustrates the range and boldness of this book. Sennett defines craftmanship as “an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake”. His interest in the subject arises from his work as an academic sociologist, but this says only the barest minimum about his expertise. He is at home in historical, philosophical and psychological literature, and has a lively interest in music, architecture and urban planning, all of which have influenced and broadened his conception of craft. He believes that craft is as vital to the healthy functioning of modern societies as it was to the medieval guilds lauded and romanticised by Morris and Ruskin. And he chooses modern examples to illustrate his thesis. He criticises computer-aided design as the enemy of the eye-guided craft of architectural composition, in terms that recall Ruskin’s assault on neoclassicism. He praises Nokia’s way of innovating through free cooperation in terms that might have been applied to the drafting of the Rule of St Benedict. His argument moves with consummate ease from the anecdotal to the theoretical and back again, and whether he is reflecting on the origins of the scalpel, on the technique of jazz piano, on disgruntlement in the National Health Service, on Diderot’s concerns in the Encyclopédie, on Schiller’s theory of play or Raymond Tallis’s theory of the hand, his thoughts are always lively, engaging and pertinent. A lifetime’s learning has gone into the writing of this book, and it is not surprising if its argument eludes any simple summary.

Craft, as Sennett sees it, belongs to the category of “social capital”: knowledge and skill that are accumulated and passed on through social interaction, and which are easily lost when social customs change. He gives the illuminating example of the Stradivari and Guarneri violin workshops, whose secrets have not survived the death of those who exploited them – not because the secrets were known to the few, hidden from the many, and then carelessly lost, but because, in an important sense, they were not explicitly known. Social capital of this kind is an example of what the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi called “tacit knowledge”: knowledge that exists in a social practice, but is not detachable from it, like the knowledge of the human heart that is contained in the practice of good manners. Such knowledge confers authority on the one who possesses it, and, as Sennett illuminatingly argues, craft traditions have been as much under threat from the modern suspicion of authority in all its forms, as from the industrialisation of the productive process. Originality and “doing your own thing” have replaced obedience and perfection as the standards to live up to, and this is everywhere to be observed in the deskilling of modern societies and in the marginalisation of those who truly know their job, and know it as something more interesting than themselves.

In various places, Sennett points to the importance of religion and ritual in the transfer of tacit knowledge, and he recognises that the great craft cultures of medieval times, in which the legacy of tacit knowledge was kept in place by the self-policing guilds, went with a form of life that we can no longer recuperate. The household of the medieval craftsman was not a place of domestic love, but a place of authority, in which the relation of master and apprentice was more fundamental than that of father and son. Civic pride counted more than domestic contentment, and the crafts themselves were fully incorporated into the religion of the town, taking their place among the rituals and sacraments whereby the community renewed its sense of legitimacy and its devotion to God. Sennett does not linger over what this means for us, who have lost all forms of tacit knowledge that depend upon a shared public faith. And for some unaccountable reason (unaccountable in a man of such broad culture), he does not mention the greatest of all artistic presentations of the phenomenon that he is describing: Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Had he looked to that exemplary source he would, I think, have recognised more clearly that craftsmanship is more than the desire to do a job well for its own sake. It involves the desire to make a gift of the result, a gift to God, and to the community that has sought God’s protection.

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