Open Ended Art - Yellow Collage

This is our first time participating in the open-ended art carnival going on here! I am excited because I think M's collage turned out pretty good! :) Of course I may have a little mama-bias going on too. ;)

I put some materials together, including a little basket with yellow pom-poms, some yellow felt pieces, yellow ribbon pieces, some green paper with stickers that he cut out earlier in the week, and a few feathers. I also put his scissors out with some yellow foam, tissue paper, and some yellow-ish scrapbook papers. I taped a piece of blue paper to the table with all the supplies:

Then I waited. M watched me set everything up and then he would occasionally go over and look at it, but he wasn't doing anything. I think he is used to me telling him it's art time and what we are going to do. I was hoping he would just climb up and start creating something.

Finally I said, "You can get up at the table and make a collage with those things if you want to." And he jumped up into the chair and got started right away.

I tried to keep quiet, and for a while I reconciled myself to the idea that he was going to have a piece of paper with 3 little yellow pom-poms and puddles of glue all over.

But I just couldn't stay quiet and eventually I said, "Ok, I think that's enough glue for now" in my happy-happy mommy voice, and I snatched the glue bottle away. :)

He cut up some of the foam and other papers and then he really started glueing stuff on. I was in another room when he came to tell me he was done. He was very excited. So was I when I saw the finished art:

How fun! I am loving this!

To see more open-ended art visit Teaching My Little BookWorm!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Sunday School on Friday - Jesus and the Children

This week we read the story about Jesus receiving the children from our little Bible.

I love this story, and it's a great way to remind children of how much they are loved - by Jesus, and us too!

We sang "Jesus Loves the Little Children". And I made some quick little flannelboard figures to tell the story:

M loved this! We left them out for a few days and I found him a couple of times doing the story on his own or telling it to Daddy. So great! It probably helped that I made it sound like Jesus was really angry about the children being kept from him. "Hey you better stop that! I LOVE children, I'm NEVER too busy to tell them I love them!!" said in a gruff voice. ;)

Unfortunately when Daddy came home, M said "Leave me alone so I can think!". Oops. I think he may have gotten that from me. This story was a good reminder to me to be more patient and to always take time to let M know I love him.

He also did this little puzzle I made for him:

The tutorial for making these quick little puzzles is here.

That was all we had time for on Friday (it was my 10 year wedding anniversary!), but we did a couple more things throughout the week.

One day, I put these little clips on the flannelboard figures:

And we played with them like this:

We just basically retold the same story, but this little difference made it a big deal to M again and he had a lot of fun moving them around on the table instead of on the flannelboard.

Then we painted a cute coloring page I printed off from somewhere (sorry, I can't remember, but there are a lot of good free coloring page websites out there). The idea was to paint it, then rub the back with oil to make it transparent and then make it into a suncatcher. Well, it didn't turn out like I hoped, so I will spare you a picture of the end product. However, here M is painting it, and that was a lot of fun!

I hope this gives you some ideas of your own for bringing the love of Jesus to your little ones too!

Happy Friday! Have a beautiful day! :)