Hands-on projects can teach a child how to organize, follow directions, and improve their completion skills on a task. Children quickly learn that, if they do not complete a project, the project does not go home. As I like to tell the children, you cannot drive a half-finished car down the road. We have a make-up day at the end of each session. This gives children a chance to go back and complete their work, but we do not JUST finish the craft project. Finishing a project means that a child goes back to the original session and completes the vowel clustering tasks from that session. Our intent is not just to make a craft project, paint a costume, or even to make a pop-up book. The purpose of both Camp Sharigan and the Reading Orienteering Club is to teach children how to read. Vowel clustering is the key [see my blog post from 1-27-18]. Vowel clustering is where we teach children to take a word apart letter sound by letter sound and then put those sounds back together and pronounce or read the word. We also teach children to build new words from a common letter sound. Vowel clustering fits perfectly with Creative Art Therapy.
For more information about these programs in action, click the Reading News link above.
![Picture](/uploads/4/3/8/7/43878759/published/reading-orienteering-club-puppet-play-oct-2017.jpg?250)
![Picture](/uploads/4/3/8/7/43878759/editor/puppet.jpg?1569692536)
Children look for excuses not to finish a worksheet. But they look for excuses to finish a Creative Art Therapy project.