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! – Painting with Stuff :)

Monday morning M said, “I have an idea!” (This is his new favorite thing to say), “Let’s paint!”  So, paint we did – I was happy to hear him request this because we used to do some sort of open art thing several times a week (we shot for once a day, but that didn’t always happen), but somehow we’ve gotten out of our art-groove lately.  I bet we haven’t had the paint out in 2 weeks.

He requested blue paint, but since there was not much left in the bottle I gave him some red too and we turned it into a color mixing lesson. 

Then I grabbed a few items that he doesn’t normally paint with – a bath pouf, an old vegetable scrubber, and a foam paintbrush.

He tried them all out:

I had him look at his paper and asked him, “What do blue and red mixed together make?”  He got it right – purple.  I was a little anxious about his answer because I’ve started to wonder if he is a little color blind when it comes to blue and purple.  Often he’s not able to distinguish between the two.  At this age it’s hard to know if he is really having trouble seeing the difference between the two colors or if it’s just that he can’t remember the color names once in a while. 

There are worse things than being color blind, I know!  So, either way I think we’ll survive, ha! :)

Here is the finished artwork:

It’s a house.  Couldn’t you tell?  It’s a “big house”.  Yep. ;)

And, he wanted more “stuff” to paint with, but my mind drew a blank!  We’ll have to do it again when I’ve given it a little more thought.  And when it’s not morning and my brain hasn’t woken up yet.

Have a beautiful day! :)