After School "Arts"

Every Tuesday, I take the girls to After School Arts, a programme we run at our Playcentre, essentially like Playcentre for our kids who have moved on to school. It's a chance for them to do some arty, crafty activities, maybe with different materials than what we would provide for our preschoolers. It's different from school curriculum art, at least what I've seen in Jen's classroom so far, in that the children are in charge of the creative process. They choose what they want to do: what paper, what collage materials, what paint, pens, adhesives etc. There are no stencils, or templates, or anything like that.

So, sometimes the kids choose an activity which is decidedly not arty. It might be cooking sausages over a campfire in the sandpit. Or, they might choose to play like pigs in mud on the hill at the back of the centre, which is what happened yesterday. As Jen said to her Dad later "it was totally awesome!"