Art Time and a little spelling Practice

Deborah over at Teach Preschool has a wonderful Facebook page, where she shares great ideas that she runs across when she is online.  It is truly fabulous.  And that is where I found this little idea about puffy paint (and I’m kicking myself for not noting the blog where she saw it).

This project was definitely a hit!

We’ve done something similar to this, here, and that was also a hit with M, but today’s version gets microwaved and turns all soft and puffy (or hard if you put it in for too long – oops!)

Recipe: 1 Cup of flour, 3 tsp of baking powder, and 1 tsp of salt.  Mix these together, then add enough water to make it pourable, but not runny.  It’s a bit like pancake batter, so go for that consistency, although I think ours would have been better just a tiny bit thicker than we had it.

 

I used a funnel to pour it into 3 squeeze bottles, filling them up about 2/3 or 3/4 of the way; then added food coloring and shook them up until it was mixed in.  The shaking part may not have been the smartest decision since it made the baking powder want to explode out of the bottles, but oh well.  You might want to mix your colors in bowls, and then transfer them to the bottles. ;)

 

I had written our last name on some cardboard, in “bubble” letters and M filled them in with the paint.  He loved this.  I’ve been trying to get him interested in learning how to spell our last name, and was so happy that this worked!

This is how the paint looked wet, as M filled in the letters:

He loved doing our last name so much, he asked me to write his first and middle names out for him too, so I did and he painted his entire name. :)

We put the painted cardboard in the microwave for about 20 seconds at a time, testing it each time to see if it was done.  It puffs up and feels a bit like play dough, except firmer and not mold-able of course. 

Very cool results:

 

I was thinking of this as art, but M kept referring to it as our “science experiment”, and I guess he was right too!  So, we had art, spelling, and science – and fun – all in one.  It doesn’t get better than that! :)

Have a beautiful day! :)

Art Time! Autumn oil pastel artwork

 

M and I recently made some autumn-themed artwork with oil pastels.  They turned out so pretty and were fun to make too.  M had to get past an initial “this feels weird on my fingers, and oh ack, it is making them dirty too” sort of thing, but then I reminded him that he is washable and he began to enjoy the process. :)  (That conversation was a bit surreal for me, considering the fact that he is normally drawn to dirt and messiness.)

Our supplies:

Construction paper in light colors, and cut in half (we used a light brown, white, and yellow); shape templates cut out so there are both the negative and the positive pieces (I found these printable shapes at Lakeshore Learning – they have quite a few free printables); and oil pastels.  We tried using cotton balls to smear the pastels, but found using our fingers gave us a much better result. 

The framed picture is there because we took a few minutes to look at it and talk about the many, many autumn activities going on in it.  I love this set of seasonal prints that I got for free at a book sale.  They weren’t painted by anyone famous or anything, but the detail and the style really appeal to me.  I’ve framed them and placed them in our breezeway above M’s little desk (we’ll switch them out each season):

We talked about the colors of autumn, and M decided that just about any color can be an autumn color if you do it right, so we decided to use all the colors of oil pastels.

We each chose a cut out shape, or a page with the shape missing, and talked a tiny bit about how these are referred to as positive and negative spaces. 

To do this, place your shape on a piece of paper, and color around the outline, using quite a bit of pressure: 

Then use your finger to smear and smudge the color onto the paper.  For the above photo, you’d smear the pastel outward, for the photo below M smeared it inward: 

And look – pretty, pretty artwork:

We made several of these and plan to string them into a banner.  Hopefully I’ll have a picture of that to share at the end of the week.

The inspiration for this art project was from this post over at Catholic Icing.  I thought it would make a beautiful project for fall.  It would be fun to do something similar with watercolors, don’t you think?  That just might have to make it onto our art to-do list!

Have a beautiful day! :)