The Art Box – April 5, 2010

 
In the Art Box last week:  Easter cardstock shapes, glitter, pom-poms, buttons, markers, paints, glue, glitter pens, foam, watercolor paints, various papers, dot painters, markers.

M saw the glitter right away and was beside himself with joy.  Why does something super-fun have to equal super-messy?   We are still finding glitter everywhere.  I put the Easter shapes on an old pan to lessen the mess (or so I thought), and he started with the glue and glitterized them. :) 
I had included other things that I hoped he would also use to decorate these, but he was only interested in the glitter.  As you can see, one lucky bunny did get a pom-pom tail. :)  I punched holes in these and made a garland for his bedroom door:

I found a pack of small glitter pens in the Target dollar spot a few weeks ago and he loves them.  (I secretly can’t wait till he’s a teenager and I can tell his girlfriends how he loves sparkly, pretty things. Hee hee.)  An added bonus – they are scented!  Mmmm… very yummy!  He made very detailed pictures and every little thing was intentional and had a name.  I’m really finding this drawing phase quite interesting.  There were around 10 papers, all very similar to this one:

And here’s an easel drawing… a spider web!

He loves cutting foam, but he knows tiny pieces of it lying around drive me nuts, so he half-heartedly made these collages:

He found a rock outside one day and had to paint it (it’s on wax paper):

He’s taken to painting pictures from coloring books lately.  I hope this doesn’t mean the end of his free-art paintings that I just adore!  He was very proud of these though:

Halfway through the week I added small trucks and some dinosaurs to his box and he loved using them to make tracks:
Have some children’s artwork you’d like to share?  Link it up below, and make sure to include a link back here in your blog post! 

Have a beautiful day! :)

The Preschool Corner – April 4, 2010

M is 3.5 years old.

This is my first post for Preschool Corner; how weird is it that I’m totally excited about that? :)

This past week we had unbelievably gorgeous spring weather, and had a relaxed week just spending time outside and enjoying being together. M was still recovering from his pneumonia, but by the end of the week he was totally back to himself, which made for a very relieved mama!

We’ve been doing a lot of dinosaur-themed activities lately, and I hope to put all of it in a single post sometime soon. For today though, here are some of the other things we’ve been up to…

PLAY:

We had such beautiful weather this week, and our first picnic in the backyard!

M has been able to spend time outside each day, and has spent a lot of it doing this: Ack, the photo is horribly blurry, but he keeps pulling extremely heavy logs off our woodpile, dragging them to the patio and then chopping the bark off of them with his little plastic axe. :) All our wood looks naked. :)

FINE MOTOR SKILLS:

This was on M’s activity shelves and he got it out every day… it’s the hammering shapes set from Oriental Trading. This is a “castle at night with the moon in the sky, but the sun is coming up because it’s almost morning”:

The beloved Spiderman slippers were washed and came out full of lint. This bothered M to no end, so I gave him the lint roller and he learned how to use it!

LITERACY:

He cut these Letter N pictures out and made a collage with them.
On our recent car trip I brought some workbooks along with us to give him something to do in the car. I’m not a huge fan of worksheets, but M loved them and can’t get enough. Here he is cutting out rhyming pictures and using tape (his new love) to put the rhyming pairs next to each other.
He did almost every letter in his homemade Build-a-Letter kit (also out on his shelves all week):
SENSORY:
I put together a sensory bin full of only soft things for M this week. It had squares of fleece, feathers, pom-poms, cotton balls, and squares of velvet. I added in some plastic eggs to use for scoops and some plastic salad tongs, a new thing for M (the kind that have a fork and spoon that move together). Here he is first taking a look at it:
The salad tongs were a big hit! He started using them right away:

The next time I looked, this is what I saw:
This was a lot of fun for him. He found that he could blow the pom poms and feathers around the room and he did so for close to 30 minutes! He said “I’m just like the wind, Mommy!” :) He spent time tossing the feathers in the air and watching them float down from various heights. He also just sat and examined each soft thing, occasionally rubbing it on his cheek (so sweet!).

For more Preschool Corner posts, go here!

Have a beautiful day! :)