A Family's Role in Developing Three-Dimensional Art at home

Provide children with many types of clay. These can include play dough, homemade clay, salt clay, and modeling clay.
Clay can be shaped, molded, and cut. Some tools for working with clay that are readily available around the home include cookie cutters, rolling pins, ice cream scoops, bottle caps, potato mashers, old scissors, toothpicks, and screws or bolts.
Wood scraps can be used to make 3-D objects. Young children can glue, nail or clamp wood scraps together to make unique structures.
Large boxes are great for making structures in which children can play. For example, go to your local appliance store and ask to have a refigerator box saved for you. Bring the box home, cut out a door and window, and help children decorate this "house" with paints and fabrics.
Aluminum foil can also be used to make sculptures. Children can crinkle it to make three-dimensional shapes and designs.
Look around the home and collect things that can be used to create a "theme" collage. As you walk around the yard, pick up sticks, leaves, pebbles, straw, bark, and sand to glue onto a piece of cardbord to make a collage.
Your children can also make prints by using kitchen utensils. They can dip the utensils, such as a potato masher, into water-soluble paint and then make their own designs on a piece of paper.

Excerpt from Creative Arts: A Process Approach for Teachers and Children, by L.C. Edwards, 2006 edition, p. 236.

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