Art Time – Magic Pictures

In an effort to use every last drop of paint from these practically empty bottles:

I put a little bit of water in each one, shook it up and poured it into our paint tray (which is a muffin tin with applesauce cups stuck in it):

This made great liquid watercolors!

I found some simple Bob the Builder coloring pages online, printed them out and traced them onto regular printer paper with a white oil pastel crayon.  I find that oil pastels work a bit better for this than regular wax crayons, but that is just my preference.

I put one paper in front of M, gave him some paintbrushes and he got busy.  He loved the watercolors.  I have to say, I think this worked so much better for us than the regular dry watercolors that you have to dip a wet brush in.

He was so surprised to see Scoop!

We did the same with two more pages (sorry no pictures!) and then he just painted on some papertowels:

  We will definitely be doing this again – it was a very fun project!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Our Reading Spot

Teaching My Little Bookworm is hosting a great link-up for posts about reading areas in our homes.

We have an entrance that we never, ever use in our house, and we’ve turned it into M’s "reading spot”.  I set up a fabric box to hold all the library books we check out, there’s a backrest for sitting on the floor, a chair, and a couple of stuffed animals.  Sometimes it gets used as an overflow area for toys too (as you can clearly see), but I try to keep it fairly tidy and inviting.

This morning M was very, very quiet as I worked in the kitchen.  You know how that normally means trouble, right?  Well, I went to see what he was doing and found this: (It’s as if he knew I wanted to do a post about this.)

I loved seeing this! 

He has a very full bookshelf in his room too, which holds the books he owns.  We normally check out 10 to 15 books from the library per week.  You can keep them for 3 weeks, and at one point I counted 40 children’s books from the library.  I felt a little… well, weird about having so many library books, but now that I’ve read some blog posts about this, I’m thinking we are pretty normal. It is a lot of reading, but we all enjoy it so much! 

Have a beautiful day! :)