Craft Time – Pumpkin Mosaic and a Sensory Lesson

M loved the way this project was set up:
“What do you have there for me, Mama?”  (Being called “Mama” is rare these days, which I can’t dwell on because it makes me oh so sad.)
He loved the idea too:  Put glue all over the pumpkin then put the little squares on it like a collage.  We’ve done mosaics before, but not in a while.  With this one we talked about how the foam pieces were squishy, the felt pieces were soft, and the paper pieces were smooth.  There were also light and dark orange foam pieces, so we talked a little about that distinction.

What he really loved, though, was the glue.  Pools and pools of glue.  He used up the last 1/3 of the bottle.  I tried, really hard, to hold my tongue, but after the 5th glue pool for one tiny orange square, I took the glue away.  I helped him spread out the copious amounts of glue already on the pumpkin with a sponge brush so he could put on more squares. 
He put on maybe 3 more.  Then he was done.  His attitude was, the glue is gone, this isn’t worth doing.  What is it with glue and this kid?!?
We did this Monday.  The glue was finally dry on Wednesday.  Finished artwork:
I ran across something similar that he made last year around Halloween:
I guess my brain is rotating ideas without me knowing it. :)
Have a beautiful day! :)

Craft Time – Misc. Projects from Apple Week

I meant to include these in my Tot School post over the weekend.  We did these last week, but I didn’t feel any of them deserved a post of their own; it was mostly ideas from other people.
Anyway, I thought I’d share them here.  Maybe I will start doing an Arts and Crafts This Week weekly post or something… I’ll have to think about it…
So, last week was Apple week here.  M and Daddy went to the farm and picked apples from the orchard.  They brought home 8 brown grocery bags FULL of apples, and said there were tons more that they didn’t get to.  I’m thinking M will have to start a roadside apple stand when he’s a little bigger!
So we made mini-caramel apples:We put sprinkles on just a couple.  I really can’t stand sprinkles, the crunch just startles me every time, but of course M loves them.  This idea was from Michelle.  They were pretty yummy!
We also did some fall-colored cookie cutter prints with our new cookie cutters: 
This idea was from Ten Kids and a Dog.
And we made a pretty apple suncatcher: This idea was from Izzie, Mac & Me.
These were all fun projects!!
Have a beautiful day! :)

Art Time – More Color Mixing Fun

I was just going through my pictures and realized we’ve done a few color-mixing lessons with paint in the last few days that I haven’t posted about. 

M loves to run his cars through paint “puddles” and make tracks.  This is what he asks for most often when it’s art time.  I don’t always post about it, because there’s only so much you can say about running cars through paint. ;)

Anyway, last week he asked for red and yellow paint and discovered that they made orange (I totally let him make the discovery and tell me about it).

Yesterday he asked for blue and yellow:After he painted for a while, I asked him what color they made when mixed together.  Here he is staring at his hand, trying to figure out exactly what that color was: He wasn’t sure but finally said “dark green”.  Apparently royal blue and yellow do make a brownish-green color.

And here he is seconds before being thrown into the bathtub, after he discovered (once again) that all the colors mixed together make “mud”: And, in case you are wondering, running cars through “mud” is the most fun of all. :)

Have a beautiful day! :)

Leaf ID sheet and a little Art Time

We are fortunate to have a yard full of trees, and lots of different ones to choose from.  A couple of days ago I went out and grabbed some leaves to make a leaf identification sheet for M. 
I simply arranged them on the scanner and copied them onto a piece of cardstock:Then I labeled them (I only picked leaves that I was sure of, but I clearly need to learn a bit more about the trees we have.  There are several I can’t identify). 
I gave the sheet and the leaves to M to match them up as I told him their names: I hope to have him gather some leaves on his own and use this sheet to identify them some time soon (he’s been sick all week, and stuck inside, poor guy!).
Then we did some rubbings of the leaves:We’ve never done rubbings of any sort, although it is something I’ve wanted to do for quite a while.  M enjoyed seeing the magic picture show up. ;)  I hid the leaves under the paper while he was out of the room.  When he started the rubbing he said, “I’m making a tree!!”.
Finished products (top pic is chalk, bottom pic is crayons): 

Have a beautiful day! :)

Open-Ended Art – Autumn Colors

It’s been a long time since we participated in the open-ended art mcklinky at Growing by Leaps and Bounds. We are happy to be back in our *art groove* this week! :) This week the theme is fall colors – orange, yellow, red, and brown. We added green in because we were working on another fall project at the same time and I felt like green added a little something (and there IS green in fall too!). :)

After creating his autumn tree masterpiece, M just wanted to paint and do his own thing on a blank sheet of paper. I love this, and we’ve gotten away from doing this on a regular basis, so I was happy he asked.

First he did this: “I’m covering all the white spots, Mommy!” Yep, I can see that. :) He is really into this painting-the-entire-paper thing lately. It’s his art, he can do whatever he wants!

Next, more paper, and he did this: It’s always a good time when the trucks get involved!! He must’ve kept himself occupied for at least an hour with all his painting that day. In my opinion, the cleanup is totally worth it!

Here’s his finished artwork:

Go here to check out more fun open-ended artwork!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Art & Craft time! Arm Print Autumn Tree (and stamping!)

I’m working at having an art, craft or sensory-type activity for M on a daily basis.  Today we made a pretty fall tree.
You will need:

• Paint in fall colors – we used orange, yellow, green, and red
• Brown paint for the tree trunk and branches
• paintbrush
• paper – we used cardstock
• leaf stamp
• pieces of felt
• something flat to use for a stamp pad.  We used saucers… more on this below.

First to make temporary stamp pads, begin by putting the leaf colors on the saucers.  We put two colors on each saucer. Next, place one small square of felt on top of each paint glob. Gently pat the felt down until the paint soaks entirely through. Optionally, you could use a sponge and let paint soak into it, but I have found sponges do not give as clear a print with stamps as does the felt.  To keep from wasting paint, you really don’t need to use as much paint as I did.  You could also use something like a cd jewel case to do this, then shut it (possibly wrap it with plastic too) to keep your “stamp pads” usable for future projects.
Now, the fun part! 
Paint your child’s inside forearm and the palm of their hand with the brown paint.  You may want to warn them that you are going to do this, apparently it can be a bit ticklish. :)  We talked about how the paint felt slick and cool on his skin.  Here’s M showing you his brown arm.  He really did love this although you would not know it by looking at his face.
Next, print the arm onto the paper for your tree:
Start stamping leaves onto the tree branches and some on the ground, or falling in the air: See how crisp the stamp is using the felt?  M wiggled the stamp some after he set it down sometimes, creating a bit more of a blurry leaf, but the felt worked really well as a stamp pad.
I let him put the stamp in different colors without wiping it off first, which turned out to be ok, because some leaves have a couple of different colors in them, just like real ones!
Here’s his finished tree:
The felt washed up nicely and so did the boy. :)
Have a beautiful day! :)

Art Time – Aluminum Foil Art

We did this for a quick and simple art project this week. We haven’t done much with foil, but as I was wrapping up something to stick in the fridge, I thought about how much fun it would be to use for art time.

So we got out the foil and some markers. I said it was quick and simple!

We talked about how shiny, almost like a mirror, the foil is; how smooth it is; and how interesting it sounds when it moves. M enjoyed using his regular markers, and then we tried the window markers. I preferred the window markers (yes, I was drawing a little bit too). M loves the white window marker because it’s so unusual to have a white marker, so he used that one a lot, but I think he liked using both kinds of marker equally.

Here’s his finished picture:

And here’s mine :) : Can you tell I am just itching for fall to get here?! :)

Have a beautiful day! :)

Art Time! New Paint Makes Us Happy

We received this in the mail earlier this week:

We’ve been running pretty low on paint and *making do* for a few weeks now. Finally, the paint drought is over. :) M was as excited as I was, and ran for the kitchen and the paintbrushes. He grabbed the tiniest paintbrush we have, and painted an (almost) entire sheet of newsprint… blue.It was at this point that he said his arm was starting to hurt, and I finally had him switch to a bigger brush. :) I had no idea the poor kid had felt so paint-deprived lately.

Then we did some quick crabapple prints – this was for me, because I’ve been seeing all the apple crafts out there in blogland lately and they are making me so anxious to start our fall theme. I was standing firm about not starting until fall is actually here, but then Daddy and Matthew brought home grocery bags full of crabapples from Grandpa’s farm and I knew we just had to do something with them.

Ah, Paint, how we love you!

We got a great deal on all this paint – a total of 96 ounces of paint – for about $15.00 (including shipping) from Discount School Supply. Their sale is still going on, so if you need paint, head over there. :)

Have a beautiful day! :)

Tot School – Sept. 13, 2009

Matthew is 36 months

It was another fun week in Tot School land. :)  I know it looks like we do a lot, but I want to stress that we normally spend about one hour “doing school” on Tuesday mornings, with only a couple more planned activities thrown in here and there if M asks for them on other days, which he normally does lately.  We try to spend time every day on an art project too, but other than that M’s time is spent mostly in self-directed play; normally I try to let the art project be very self-directed too.  Sometimes his free play time is with me or Daddy (and if it’s a definite learning-type activity I try to capture it with some pictures) and very often on his own, or with a friend.  Regardless of what it looks like we really don’t spend all our time on school! :)
Ok, now that that is out of the way… here’s what we did this week. :)
I showed M the new letter H file I put together for his ABC book.  I posted about this here and made it available for download. :)
First, He put helicopter and “H” foam stickers on the Hh templates:
He pretty much insisted on putting the stickers around the letters instead of on them. :)  Simple as this was, M absolutely loved doing it.
Then he practiced tracing the letters.  He wants to draw his letters so badly, so I included this activity in the file (you can see his tripod grasp is pretty non-existent, or was on this day anyway):
We played a tic tac toe game using Hard Hats and Hammers:

And we went through little pictures of things that begin with H.  I’ve found this is a one of the best activities to help him learn the sound a letter makes.  I always include this with our ABC book pages.  We say /h/ /h/ /h/ hammer, /h/ /h/ /h/ house, etc, stressing the initial sound as we look at each picture.  It’s fun and kind of turns into a chant of sorts.
We worked on the Heart pattern strips… he is just not getting the concept of repeating patterns.   Ah well, I need to remain patient and remember at 3 the important thing is lots of exposure to a concept and it will finally *click*. :)  Here’s the pattern strips after I re-did them the right way, ha:
Finally, he colored the shapes for the shape House.  He is so not into crayons.  If I had let him use markers I would’ve gotten a better response, I think.  He colored for a while, like this: then he wanted me to finish it.  I had him tell me which color to use for each part, then did it.  He enjoyed being the teacher. :)  Here is the shapes house all finished and put together:

After that we did a few more tot school activities – we used our counting mats to count with M&Ms. :)  We are still only going up to number 4 because he still is working on one to one correspondence and the idea that the last number you say is the number of items.

I created a little measuring activity for him.  I got the idea here, and altered it slightly.  M is really, really into tools lately and of course that includes what he calls his “measurers”, which is a tape measure and a square with a ruler on the side.  So I made this: (ignore the close up of my dirty carpet, please)

He loved this and I think it would’ve gone over even better if I had used something other than ribbon to measure.  But, that was all I could think of at the time.

Then we practiced scissor skills by cutting out large shapes drawn on construction paper:He did so well with this, we saved the shapes to show to Daddy later.  I wish I would’ve taken a picture of them all cut out.   
He loves this little paperclip color match game.  He just recently became very good at doing this and is enjoying his new found skill.  He wanted to do this again another day but lost interest pretty quickly.  So I grabbed the bag of paper clips and gave him a new challenge – paper clip chains: I’m noticing this kid does not smile much for pictures.  Please believe me, though, when I tell you he enjoyed an activity. :)

He practiced spooning the pretty, pretty glass pebbles from a glass dish into an ice cube tray:

We did our fantastic movement cards again and got a little exercise in.  I am thinking of making this a daily activity.

Another day he was itching to do some hammering, so I gave him a large piece of styrofoam that came in a package we received and a baggie full of golf tees.  This kept him busy on and off for most of the day.  The next day he took the golf tees (“nails”) out with his pliers – I was impressed he thought of this – I sure hadn’t. then as I was doing laundry he decided to saw it.  The boy is all about tools these days.  This is what awaited me after the laundry: It was a mess.  But I was not too bent out of shape about it – he had thoroughly enjoyed himself, and the amount of time it kept him occupied was definitely worth the 10 minutes or so of cleaning and vacuuming I had to do. 
I’ve been trying to have a small activity set up for him to do independently around 4:00 pm when Daddy is not yet home but dinner needs to be cooked.  This week we tried stenciling with our do-a-dot painters:I really need to pull together some more activities for this purpose – any ideas?  Nothing too complicated to set up and something he can do by himself.  You know how it is when that time of day rolls around…
Here’s my favorite picture of the week.  M’s cousin S came over and she is a crafty kind of girl.  They crafted all day.  She has been dying to make a sunshine guy like M made a long time ago.  They both made new ones and then posed with them for me: Aren’t they sweet? And the kids are nice too.  ;)  Hee hee.
For more great tot school ideas, go here!  Sorry for so much rambling this week! :)
Have a beautiful day! :)