Art Time! Salty Watercolors

This is one of those art projects I’ve had in the back of my mind for ages – meaning to do it, forgetting about it, remembering it, getting too busy to do it, forgetting it again… you get the picture. :)
Finally, we did it.  And, boy, am I glad we did!
It is from one of our favorite art books - Scribble Art by MaryAnn Kohl. 
We used white cardstock, glue, table salt, pipettes, paintbrushes, and our fabulous homemade liquid watercolors left over from a previous project.  (I covered our art tray / muffin tin with foil and the paints kept pretty well.  I did have to add a few drops of water to each cup and mix them up, but they worked just great and were still nice and vivid.)

M scooted up to the table and got busy with the glue bottle:
Then we tried sprinkling salt on with a spoon -
but it was not covering the glue as well as we needed it to.  If you do this, you need to put  a lot of salt on your glue pattern.  I finally just dumped it on right out of the box.  Then we tapped the extra salt off into the tray and we were left with this:
The idea at this point is to gently touch the salt pattern with watercolor paints and it will spread out – you can actually watch it soak through the salt along the lines you’ve made.  We started off with pipettes:It worked, but the paint was also forming puddles because M was squeezing too much paint out.  We (*I*) couldn’t clearly see the salt doing it’s thing because of the puddles.  So, I tried to get M to use a paintbrush and just barely touch it to the salt lines.  This is actually what the book directs you to do, and I should’ve listened to the book because M loves those pipettes dearly (they are fun) and we had a bit of a disagreement at this point.  ;)
Anyway, it did work better with the brush, as long as you just touch the salt.  Don’t brush the salt.  That point is very important!
It was a very neat and fascinating project, watching the soft colors of the paint spread along the salt, sometimes mixing together and creating new colors.  There was something just very slow and relaxing about it. 
Here are the finished art pieces:

This is definitely on our “do again!” list!
Have a beautiful day! :)

Sunday School on Friday – Daniel in the Lion’s Den

We were in a hurry this past Friday – trying to get out of town for the big Labor Day weekend (hope you all had a wonderful weekend!), so we only had a short amount of time to spend on our Bible story.
We read Daniel in the Lion’s Den in both of our Children’s Bibles (see them here and here), one in the morning and the other at nap time.
We learned this song with motions (from Hubbard’s Cupboard, click the picture to go to the site):
And we made a paper plate lion. I drew inspiration for this idea from both DLTK and Making Learning Fun.
You will need a paper plate, paint, paintbrush,glue, a triangle cut from construction paper or foam, googley eyes, and 6 strips of black yarn.
First, paint a paper plate orange. We are running low on paint, so we mixed red and yellow together. You could do different color combinations too – maybe yellow for the face and orange or brown for the outer edge of the plate (lion’s mane), but we made it simple and did orange all over.
Glue on googley eyes, and a triangle nose (we used brown construction paper).
Next, glue on whiskers. For the whiskers I put the glue lines on the plate so M could see where to stick the yarn pieces.
For a little scissor practice, I drew black lines for M to cut on the back of the plate, around the mane at about 2 inch intervals.


Ta da – our finished lion:
We also read a library book that sort of tied in to this story. It is titled How Loud is a Lion? by Clare Beaton.

This is a fun book that goes through characteristics of several animals, always asking at the end of each page, “But how loud is a lion?”. Finally, at the end you see the lion and he ROARS (very loudly at our home, but only as loudly as you wish at yours :) ). We discussed how lions are loud and have sharp teeth and claws that could hurt people, and how wonderful it was that God sent an angel to keep Daniel safe – the lions didn’t even touch him!
Have a beautiful day! :)