Summertime Art – Leaf Printing (in your swimsuit)

I’m trying to do one planned and structured art project with M each week.  He gets in plenty of self-directed art with his art easel outside and his little art box inside.  MaryAnn Kohl’s book, Preschool Art has been a great source of ideas and inspiration, and this little project came straight from its pages.






  

We both enjoyed this activity… M loved the process, and I love the beautiful result.

To do this, you will need a sturdy piece of cardboard or cardstock, glue, paint in the colors you want (M chose green, yellow, and blue), a small paint roller (ours is from the craft section at Walmart), a small tray or dish to roll the paint in, and some sheets of plain paper. You’ll also need newspaper to put under your project if you are working on a surface that you don’t want painted.

Next, you need to go find your leaves!  This was a really fun part of the project for M – he hunted and hunted until he found the perfect leaves.  Yes, we did take a few straight from our shrubs or low-hanging tree branches, but we found a lot just lying on the ground too.  You’ll need fresh, flexible leaves, not ones that are dry and apt to crumble when they are being rolled with paint.

Arrange them, face down, on your piece of cardboard.  You want the lined and veined surface on the underneath to be face up.  Once you are pleased with your arrangement, glue them in place.

Put some paint in your tray and roll your roller through it.  We started off with green and yellow (mostly green), then for our third print we added in a little blue.

(Like how the newspaper appeared under his work?  Suddenly I realized I didn’t really want a green and yellow picnic table.  And do you think the people listed in those obituaries minded that we were using them for this?)

Gently, gently, roll the leaves with the paint:

Oh my heavens, my chubby little baby has turned into a skinny big boy!

Once every leaf is covered with paint, place a sheet of plain paper over the top and rub it, again gently, all over.  

Lift it off and you’ve made lovely leaf prints!
I have these hanging in my kitchen now and sometimes I just stop to admire them.  I’m thinking of framing them and hanging them in our breezeway (like a 3-season porch that runs the length of our house).  They make me happy. :)

Have a beautiful day! :)

3-D Nature Art

M has a “nature basket” that he just adores.  Anything interesting that he finds outside is lovingly placed in his nature basket.  Quite often it’s mainly full of leaves and I empty it every once in a while (he doesn’t seem to notice).  This time, however, it had lots of really cool things in it – a group of leaves still clumped together on a stem, several pieces of bark (he’s taken to sawing the bark off of our fire wood), some maple seeds, and some tiny pinecones.  I decided these were keepers and set up an art activity for him one morning.

Here’s what we used:
His nature basket, an egg carton, and some playdough that we need to use up so we can make a new batch.

(As an aside, this playdough has been around since Valentine’s Day – seriously!  And it is still in perfect condition!  I am loving our homemade playdough.  I know I posted our recipe at sometime… I’ll have to look for that link!)

M was really excited about this project, even more so than I expected him to be.  He rolled small portions of the playdough into balls and set them inside the egg carton sections, pressed them down a tiny bit, and then stuck his nature treasures into the playdough:
We didn’t have enough playdough for 2 of the sections, so he decided to leave the two sections in the center empty.  We've noticed he's very symmetrical with things like this - is that odd for a 3 year old?

Here’s what his final product looked like:

And the view from the side:
M was very proud of it, and I absolutely love it!  It looks so neat sitting on a table in our breezeway.

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! :)

Open Ended Art – Paper Mosaics

The open ended art theme at Teaching My Little Bookworm this week is Mosaics with Paper.
M’s cousin S was over the day we did this. She is an artsy little 4 year old and I knew she would definitely want in on the action.
I set up a tray of colored paper cut into squares, as well as some templates cut from cardstock. Knowing that our summer days are numbered, I was trying for a summer theme so I cut out a butterfly, a sun, a star, and a beach ball:

I gave them each some glue and they got busy! (That would be a puddle of glue that you see forming on M’s beach ball. He’s crazy when it comes to glue.)
(The necklaces they are wearing were from their previous project – they spent the entire day creating stuff. It was great!)
Here’s the finished pieces:
We are planning to create a mobile from these, but it just hasn’t happened yet!
Check here for more great mosaic ideas!
Have a beautiful day!

Open Ended Art – Mosaics with Pebbles

To be fully truthful, I’ll let you know right away that I am totally cheating on this Open Ended Art project. :) For M’s birthday we had him make a stepping stone (from a kit – you can find them at Michael’s), and it sort of, kind of used pebbles. Glass pebbles, that is. :)
We’ve had this kit since he was 18 months old, and kept meaning to make it… and kept forgetting again. SO, we finally got it done on M’s 3rd birthday. He loved doing it and we highly recommend these for Christmas gifts for the grandparents! :)
I mixed the stone material and water together, then Daddy helped M make his handprints:

I put the letter tiles in where I wanted them, then M had fun placing the pieces of glass and glass pebbles wherever he wanted.

He really enjoyed this, we had to remind him a couple of times to be careful not to mess up the words or his handprints; all in all he did a great job!
Here’s the finished stone:

I can’t believe my baby is 3 years old!
For more mosaic ideas, head over to Teaching My Little Bookworm!
Have a beautiful day! :)

Art Time - Summertime Sand Art

This project is a lot of fun. We did this same thing last fall... inside. What a mistake that was. I'm ok about some messiness, but that took messiness to a whole new level. Anyway, I wanted to do it again, and this time we took it all outside. That's really where sand belongs anyway, isn't it?

Please excuse my messy patio. How is it I never see what needs to be done until I've taken pictures of it?

We bought our colored sand at Michaels, but I believe you can color your own sand with food coloring and let it dry, if you are inclined to do so. (If you are, I'm in awe of you.)

We bought little salt and pepper shakers at the dollar store. I filled them up with the different colors of sand using a funnel, then stuffed 2 to 3 cotton balls in at the top to keep the sand from spilling out. M wanted red and blue construction paper, so that's what we used. Here's the set up:

Actually, the picture doesn't show it, but we ended up putting the paper in a shallow pan to catch the extra sand. The rocks are to hold it down.

Give your child the glue bottle. Chances are they'll know exactly what to do from there (sorry the picture is blurry).

Shake the sand onto the paper:

It looks pretty just like that, doesn't it?

Shake the sand off, and let your masterpiece dry. It's fun and the clean up was pretty easy - take the extra sand to the sandbox and dump it in.:) M loved doing this and it was the first thing he showed to Daddy when Daddy came home.

While M was doing this I made some sand letter cards to use when we are learning letters. M has been asking me to help him write letters, and I thought tracing these with his fingers would be a good way to start learning how they are shaped. Montessori teachers have sandpaper letters that they use for this. These are no where near the same quality, but hopefully will be helpful anyway!

Have a beautiful day! :)