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Need a craft idea for a library program? Take a look of Red Ted Art

June 21

We will be looking at a craft teaching website: Red Ted Art. Home Page - Red Ted Art - Kids Crafts

 https://www.redtedart.com/

It has 2500+ crafts ideas and how-to-do videos and instructions sheets. The crafts are browsed by seasons, holidays and special occasions, as well as by age group and types of art craft. Users of any age can make a craft using this resource. While an adult can borrow a DIY gift idea from this site, the crafts shown here are generally for children to make, use or give, as they are simple, safe, fun, contain themes of children's stories and characters, and reflective of children's way of looking at the world.

One useful category is gift ideas for teachers. With a few inexpensive materials the kid or the parent can make a lovely gift for the teacher, like a bath bomb, a paper weight, or a lavender bag. Cute gifts that show your appreciation and make a teacher smile.

Another good resource is the holiday gifts. The fact that there are many Chinese New Year crafts is a refection and celebration of the diverse cultures in our schools. It is also because of this fact that I became aware of this website. I was looking for craft ideas and tutorials for my library program assignment. My program was about dragon which was this year's animal in Chinese zodiac. A school librarian showed me this website. I think she also uses this site to help make crafts with her students. We found many craft ideas for making dragons, from masks, to coloring and puppets. I will come back to this site for more ideas if I need to do another project with children, now I have discovered it and know that other school librarians have been using it.

There is a also a Red Ted Art TV on this website  that shows the audience short snippets of craft making. It's a fun way to showcase the how-to-do, but it's intermingled with ads.

The owner, author and mastermind of this website is Maggy. In her little biography page, she described herself as someone who has been passionate about crafts from a young age, When she became a mom of two children, she found out how important it was to have someone who has a lot of experience with crafts helping you. She has won a number of UK based awards over the years for her craft blogs.

Due to copyrights restrictions, which are specifically addressed in this website by the author, I will not show her crafts here. I had to resist the temptation to copy the pictures of the crafts, given what we have learned about copyrights in this course, that the mere fact that it's creative work and written down, recorded or saved is enough to create a copyright. So the contents of this website certainly qualify as copyrighted works.

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