Art – Page 10 – Butterbees and Bumbleflies

An Invitation to Scrape

In continuing my Fridays of Fun with Art this year, here’s another fabulous way to make several sheets of art to use in your 2016 Calendar! You can do this with any color, though I think it’s best including white. We were able to talk about how the blue stayed blue, but it got lighter by adding the white. This would be a fabulous activity for Valentine’s Day coming up using red and white to make pink!

As an educator, I totally see the purpose behind “process not product” artwork – it’s more important for the children to experience the art than to worry about what it ends up looking like. However, that is a fairly new concept for me… so when I have an idea in my head that we’re going to use these really neat scrapers that Cody got for us, then I kinda think that’s how it should be. Well…. the invitation was there. And I had great fun scraping on my paper. (Didn’t it turn out AWESOME!?!)

Becca scraped some, but I didn’t think about this simple fact – her fine motor skills are such that holding a scraping square might be too challenging to be considered “Fun with Art”… so she went off on her own tangent and ended up painting her hand, and then painting on the paper. I rolled with it, and I’m so glad that I did, because we really had a LOT of fun making these pages together.

In the end, we have some BEAUTIFUL art sheets that are going to go fabulously in our 2016 Calendar collages. I’m so excited to try more painting with her – experimenting with colors and textures, and just seeing where she decides to take my next invitation. 🙂

Just an idea of what I’ve started doing – she does two sheets totally on her own, I do two sheets totally on my own, and then we do one sheet together. So our sheet together was the black one and we ended up making fingerprint snowflakes all over it! I think that will probably be the background for our January 2016 collage. 🙂

Gross Motor Strengthening: Bowling/Kickball

All this month on Tuesdays, I’ll be sharing Gross Motor Strengthening games and activities we’re doing to help Becca with her Gross Motor skills. She really struggles sometimes in this area (I did too as a kid), so I’ve been looking for fun new ways to get her moving.

She loves the Amazon Original show – Creative Galaxy. Arty and his friends solve problems through art! In one of the real life craft examples between episodes, some kids were making bowling pins out of water bottles. Well, we don’t have water bottles, but we do have lots of puffs containers from lil Brother’s snacks! So, we decorated puffs containers and turned them into bowling pins! (I taped the lids on with Washi tape and then she added stickers. And… bonus… if you pick 3d stickers to put on them like I did, it takes quite a bit of fine motor control to get them off of the sticker sheet, as well. 😉 I’m a sneaky Mommy like that. ) So to do this activity in your own home, you could easily use water bottles, puffs containers, Pringles containers, or even empty shampoo bottles – get creative! They just need to be tall, skinny, and lightweight so your child can be successful at knocking them over.

We set them up, and she tried rolling the ball to knock the pins over. It worked partially. And then she decided to kick the ball and see if she could knock them over. Success! So, the fabulous thing about this activity is that it includes some art and creativity, and then the pins can either be for kickball or for bowling! One day use it for one, the next day, try it for another! Talk about really working out those Gross Motor skills all with one simple activity! You could easily do this outside on the driveway if it’s a beautiful day, or inside if it’s cold and rainy/snowy! I love the flexibility behind this activity.

Like this post? Please be sure to check out my Facebook page, where I share not only my own ideas, but also posts from other parents & professionals that can help you with your kids! Simply click on over to www.facebook.com/butterbeesandbumbleflies or click “like” on the button to the right.

Do-a-Dot Butterflies!

As you know from reading any of my posts here (or as you could probably gather from my blog title) butterflies are big around our house. Becca has been fascinated with butterflies from a young age, and we love to do butterfly activities. So yes, I realize that we are stuck in the dead of winter making butterflies… but what does it hurt to dream of spring a little – even if it is January? Plus, the awesome thing is, you can do this Do-a-Dot art and use it not for butterflies, but for your 2016 calendar!! Not sure what I’m talking about because you just happened to stumble across this post? Well, welcome! And check out the info on how to make your own fabulous 2016 calendar over here.

do a dot butterflies

Here’s what you’ll need:

coffee filters (whatever size you have on hand – we used the 4 cup ones)
clothespins (if you’re just doing the art, not making the butterfly craft, you don’t need these)
a squirt bottle with water
Do-A-Dot markers (We have this set:Do A Dot Art Marker Brilliant 6-pack aff link)
Activity trays (or a really good plastic table cloth would work too- but the markers DO bleed through the coffee filters – esp when they get wet)

First, you’ll make your dots, then as soon as you’ve made all your dots, spray the filter with water. Watch the marker spread!

To make the butterfly craft, simply pinch the filters in your clothespins, draw little faces, and hang your butterflies on some fishing line or attach to a photo frame, so they appear to be flying! We hung ours on our art display wall – they are just waiting to help hold up some fabulous art this year!

Mini Habitat Boxes

Every Tuesday this month, I have shared with you some ideas for various animal habitat boxes. (Arctic/Antarctic – Farm – Dinosaurs – Ocean) But what if you don’t have abundant space to store all of these habitats? And what if you don’t have a million storage containers big enough for everything that I showed?

That’s where these MINI Habitat Boxes come in! Simply using a small Ziploc box, or even a washed out lunchmeat container (hello, recycling and FREE!), you can make a fun habitat box. Whether it’s a Serengeti refuge for just four safari animals, or a woodland retreat for five, these mini habitat boxes can provide just as much fun for your kids, while making it possible to have even more variety stored in a smaller amount of space! You could also create two different mini boxes from the same Toob of animals so that siblings could have their own habitat boxes to play in.

Shown in these boxes are a combination of animals from a variety of Toobs that haven’t already been placed into sensory boxes. I love it that we bought several Toobs and combined them all into one big bag so that when I want to make a box, I can just go and sift through and see what we have available. You can find the animals shown above in these Toobs (affiliate links – thank you for your purchases!):

Safari Ltd Pets TOOB

Safari Ltd Big Cats TOOB

Safari Ltd Wild TOOB

Clothespin Painting

Last week you may have read about our calendar art. (If not, be sure to go back and read that post!) So today I’ve got the first of many Friday “Fun with Art” posts for you that will give you some fun ideas for making your own calendar art.

For this activity, you’ll need a few clothespins, some paint, some thick textured card stock paper (I like to use it for painting b/c it’ll stand up to the liquid better than regular paper), and some random textured materials.

I found a large pom pom, a paper rose, some tulle, some burlap cording, some ribbon, and some felt. Just scrunch those items into your clothespins, and you’re good to go! We used pink, white, and purple paint on dark red paper – perfect for using with our February collage for the calendar. Becca enjoyed seeing the differences in what happened when she would dab the paintbrush vs dragging it across the paper. We each ended up doing two whole sheets. I like to do art alongside her so that she’ll get different ideas about how to use the materials, but also so that she’ll see me enjoying art, which encourages her to want to do more.

Here’s our finished products!

Next week, I’ll be sharing the other type of art that we’re using for our February collage. Remember – I won’t be sharing the finished collages until after Christmas – and would love for you to share yours with me throughout the year for me to post as well – when we share ours at the end of the year. You can email me anytime at butterbeesandbumbleflies@gmail.com.

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