Imagination at Work

Every month we get an issue of High Five, a preschool version of Highlights magazine.  The subscription was a gift from Matthew’s grandma, and he LOVES it.  Every issue has a page with a picture of something to build using blocks or every day items at home. 

Here’s the picture from our current issue:

It’s an apartment building, built with blocks and empty cereal boxes.

And here’s what has been standing in our living room floor since Friday night:

I really should’ve taken a picture of M playing with it and setting it up, because he was really into it.  Seriously into it.

We got these little crate-style containers at Dollar Tree a year ago and we keep M’s little cars, musical instruments, and a train set in them.  Well, apparently we did keep those things in them, but now they are just lying in heaps on the floor.  Because he needed an apartment building.  :) 

Really he treats it more as a house; I’m not sure he really knows what an apartment building is.  There’s a garage to the side made from blocks, and the book in the front is the sidewalk (couldn’t you tell?).

And, yes, some of the people living in the apartments are figures from M’s nativity set that he has refused to let us put away since last Christmas.  He plays with them like they are action figures, lol.  If you look closely you’ll see Mary on the rooftop and baby Jesus in the middle square, hee hee. :)

I thought it was such a great idea, and works so well.  You can’t beat a play house/apartment building for $3.00!  And believe me, I’m not upset at all that I need to go back to the Dollar Tree to buy more containers for the toys that were evicted!! 

Have a beautiful day! :)

Art time – Yellow Prints

The theme for open-ended art this week was yellow and prints.  Check it out here.

I’ve been wanting to do some circle prints lately, with all the lids we’ve collected (since I’ve started doing creative stuff with M I can’t seem to throw anything away!), so I set it out yesterday morning.  M wanted blue paint too, and since it’s his art, I complied:

  I had some lids and some old spools too.  He was really interested in the spools.  He yelled, “look Mommy, steering wheels!”  Sure enough:

He worked on this for a while, and he did notice that blue and yellow mixed together make green.  I know we’ve gone over that before, but this time he noticed it and mentioned it on his own.

He started playing around with the paint right on the saucer, and I don’t remember his exact words, but I finally realized he wanted me to notice the designs he made on the saucers, and to hang them on the wall (we have one decorative plate on the wall, and I guess that gave him the idea).  We got some paper and pressed them onto the saucers, and made prints of his “designs”:

(I know the masking tape holding up all his artwork in our house is just sooo elegant, isn’t it?)

Here’s the final product:

Have a beautiful day! :)