You can acquaint the baby with plasticine at the age of one or one and a half years. Indeed, modeling is a great opportunity to have fun and usefully, and, in addition, to develop fine motor skills, spatial thinking, imagination and imagination! In order for the peanut to like sculpting, it is important to choose only high-quality and age-appropriate materials for classes. So, plasticine for the smallest should be soft, bright and not very stick to the hands. But most importantly - it must be absolutely safe, because children very often pull everything in their mouths.
Starting modeling lessons, one should not immediately try to teach the peanut to make "sausages" and "balls", and even more so try to master more complex figures. To begin with, it is better to offer the child plasticine for the smallest and allow him to independently examine and explore an unfamiliar thing. Do not immediately give the child all the bars or jars - one or two colors is enough for a first acquaintance. It will be very interesting for the child to crush the magic plasticine in the pens and watch how it changes shape. Mom needs to immediately prepare for the fact that after a fun lesson, most likely, you will need to wash the crumbs and wipe the adhered plasticine from the surface of the table and floor, but the result, namely the baby’s contented face, his interest and burning eyes, is worth it! And in order to minimize subsequent cleaning, you should carefully organize the workplace using special boards for modeling. The floor under the chair can be covered with oilcloth or newspaper, which is especially true if the creative process takes place in a room with a carpet on the floor.
Process or result
Often, when she offers plasticine plasticine for the smallest, mom thinks that after a couple of orientation classes it will already be possible to proceed to serious lessons. In her dreams, she already makes plans on how to teach her child how to sculpt one or another simple figure, but in practice she is faced with the fact that the child is not at all interested in such “conscious” creativity (this is true for children in their first 2-3 years of life). Often the baby just sculpts something, and then it looks what happened. For the baby, the molding process itself is important, and not its result. Therefore, it is not necessary to force events, because the most important thing is to instill in the child an interest in modeling, and everything else will come with age and experience. Moreover, it is so exciting to try to understand what happened in the end and try to see some recognizable features in an incomprehensible subject!
However, this does not mean that you need to put the child at the table, give him a soft clay and leave it to himself, simply observing his safety from a distance: let, he says, he comprehends the properties of objects and learns to create independently. Indeed, in this case, the baby will lose interest in modeling after just one or two of these “activities”, while working together with mom or dad (as well as older brothers and sisters) will help instill a love for this fascinating work!
Activities for kids
So, plasticine for the smallest is bought, the workplace is prepared - it's time to create! In order to interest the child, it is worth offering him interesting and unusual game activities. For example, in order to teach the little one to pinch off pieces of plasticine, you can play with him in hens and chickens, who really want to taste the grains and ask the child to help them. It will be interesting for the kid to tear small pieces from the block of plasticine and treat them to hens (which you can simply draw, cut out of paper or use crumbs toys).
Also, many kids like to create "plasticine applications" that are great for the first acquaintance with plasticine. There can be a lot of options: a mother draws a cloud, and the baby makes a plasticine rain from pieces of droplets, mom draws a tree, and the baby decorates it with leaves and fruits, mom draws a red fly agaric, and the baby complements it with white dots ... For such games, you can use ready-made manuals, and you can invent and draw pictures yourself, which any adult can easily handle. In addition to creating plasticine applications, a kid may like to smear soft plasticine on cardboard or thick paper - this is also a great way to get to know the fascinating molding process.
And most importantly, the child should see that modeling is interesting not only to him, but also to his mother. If for mothers such classes are a “heavy duty”, which causes irritation and a desire to “shoot back” and finish the lesson as soon as possible, then the likelihood that the little one will be interested in modeling will decrease dramatically. But if a mother is happy to create with her baby (and it doesn’t matter at all how well she does), then the child has a much greater chance of falling in love with modeling!