Make First

We’ve examined our work with learners, teachers and maker educators to pinpoint what’s special about craft learning and packed it all into the Make First approach. 

Make First is a learner-driven approach that empowers children and young people to follow their curiosity as they explore materials, make decisions about their work and develop their voice as a maker.

Want to find out more about using Make First in your classroom? Take a look at our Craft School resources.

The key principles of Make First are:

• Make First is playful and open-ended; enjoy the making and don’t focus on the final outcome
• Dive straight into making! Pick your materials and have a go
• Explore your interests and develop your voice as a maker
• Tweak and tinker with materials to develop your ideas
• Start again, work on several things at once or repeat the same thing with different materials
• Fail and try again to become a braver maker
• Make First is about the joyfulness and pleasure that comes from making
• Build skills and knowledge from your interactions with materials and the physical world
• Learn together as a community

Environmental Sustainability

When we begin our work with an understanding of materials—those found in nature and their scarcity or renewability; manmade resources that can be reused and repurposed; and the new materials being invented to lessen our impact on the environment—an understanding of sustainability follows. Materials exploration offers the opportunity to make tangible the abstract issues that we must understand in order to tackle the global climate crisis. Embodied learning and haptic engagement connect us to the physical world, balancing an over-engagement with screen-based learning.

Making and Wellbeing

Make First centres playfulness, joy and the sense of achievement that comes from creation. Perhaps one of the most important elements of making is the impact it has on our health and wellbeing – a growing concern for schools. That ‘magic’ that happens when one is absorbed in making (alone or in a group) is down to the gentle mechanism of action, ‘the effort involved in ‘making something’, the multi-sensory engagement, repetitive actions and anticipation of satisfaction from the rewarding final product are related to release of neurotransmitters, like serotonin and dopamine, that promote joy and well-being, while also reducing stress hormones like cortisol.

Social justice

Craft and social justice are closely entwined, and we seek to bring this relationship into the classroom. Making is central to the human experience; craft provides an important vehicle for decolonising the curriculum and engaging learners with artists, makers and designers from a range of global communities. Through research, interaction with craft objects, and engagement with personal and community heritage, Make First nurtures reflective making practices. It encourages learners to explore their identities as makers and to integrate personal, local, and global experiences into their work.

Historically, craft has often been a form of protest; it can also provide learners with an opportunity to discuss, question and find their own perspective on historical and contemporary social issues. Craft provides a means of self-expression for learners who face barriers to other forms of communication, helping to build confidence and self-esteem.

Get in touch

For more information on Make First and how Crafts Council can support your learners, please contact our Education team.

• Email education@craftscouncil.org.uk
• Join our Craft Educators Facebook Group for regular updates