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Sax Arts & Crafts – Celebrating the Masterpiece Within Each Student!

Review by By E. K. Treppel

Arts and crafts are among the most popular extra-academic activities homeschoolers engage in. Virtually every homeschooling family with smaller children is drawn to making stick puppets and wooden dolls for holiday decorations or foul-weather indoor play dates, and decorating rocks or pieces of wood with child-safe paints. Next, the family with slightly older children becomes interested in weaving, sewing and knitting, as well more involved drawing and painting projects including paper-Mache. Finally, once the children reach the age of ten to twelve and capable of being more careful and responsible with the materials, the family moves into more advanced activities of pottery, jewelry-making, decoupage, mosaics, sculpting and possibly even photography.

Click to visit Sax Arts & Crafts' web site

Whether you need products for Painting, Drawing, Ceramics, Sculpture, Printmaking, Jewelry Making, Mosaics, Stained Glass, Crafts and Art Resources, Sax Arts & Crafts has it. From everyday basics to highly specialized and hard-to-find items, look to www.saxarts.com for their 345-page catalog! Since 1945, Sax has been the trusted supplier of art & craft materials and equipment to schools, institutions and creative individuals.

Just looking through the massive catalog provides the curious parent with scores of ideas for projects and activities to enrich their children’s lives and education while developing a lifelong appreciation for arts and crafts skills.

To give you a thumbnail idea of how extensive their product line is, the Sax catalog features 21 entries under the “Airbrush” section alone, from the inexpensive beginner models to those fully-loaded professional ones used in the trade. Are you looking for cameras and slide equipment? Sax offers some consumer-level digital cameras and an array of slide projectors and slide accessories. This same section of the catalog includes screen printers for printing on T-shirts, jackets, etc. While these might be too expensive for casual use, if one wished to begin a business at home, doing custom printing, or if one had skill at copy writing, this could become a lucrative income supplement.

Of course, Sax offers a vast selection of brushes, paints, and art studio supplies, including aprons for adults and children; a wide variety of art papers, including remnants and metallics; easels; stretcher bars; brush conditioner; Artbin® supply carrying cases; portfolios and Crayola®, Mr. Sketch® and Pentel® markers and crayons.

While you are at the Sax Arts & Crafts website, please take some time to investigate the Sax Family and Consumer Sciences website, too! This is designed to serve the high school home economics teacher, but the prices are reasonable and Sax offers an exciting array of small home appliances, cooking utensils and other products for homemaking that are perfect for the homeschooling family to be aware of. Some of the items are usually offered in restaurant supply stores, not in a consumer-only setting. For that reason alone, this website bears long-term attention. This site also contains many varied books and supplemental products which are useful to parents, such as “50 Lesson Ideas for Character Education” and a multi-volume classroom series called “Games and Activities Curriculum”, (Gr 6-12) which could be utilized by a support group as a class offering or by two families with large number of children! Please visit www.saxarts.com for the arts and crafts line and https://www.schoolspecialtyonline.net/index.jsp for the home living line. A word of warning, however: Allow yourself plenty of time for leisurely shopping – these websites are vast in their scope! E.K.T.