Art – Page 13 – Butterbees and Bumbleflies

Microwave Puff Paint

Well, I’ve mentioned before how much I love the ideas from Jean over at The Artful Parent… and THIS idea for Microwave Puffy Paint is no exception! What a super fun way to tie in cooking with art! Becca really loved this one. We made the puffy paint (recipe below), and then used Duple blocks to make prints on cardstock paper. Then, we watched them puff up. It was amazing. And super, super fun. I think we’ll have to do it again soon. Note: this recipe makes a LOT of paint! We had some left over, which I’m attempting to keep in the fridge. We’ll let you know how that works out.

We also added colored glitter to ours… which added some sparkle to our pictures, but not as much as I would have thought. Live and learn. Probably not a real great idea to add glitter to this paint… it doesn’t really show up, and just wastes glitter.

The recipe:

Microwave Puffy Paint

1 cup flour
1 tsp salt
1 cup water
Food coloring

Whisk your flour, salt, and water together really, really well – so there are no clumps. Then divide, and add your food coloring.

You can put it into squeeze bottles, or dip items like we did. Do your painting, then stick the cardstock, cardboard, or paper plate into the microwave for about 30 seconds. Watch it puff up! If you don’t have much paint on your page, it won’t take the whole 30 seconds. If you have a lot more, it might take a little longer.

Enjoy!!! It’s SOOOO much fun!

Making an Impression

All this month, I’ll be sharing a variety of art activity ideas for you on Mondays… this week, I wanted to share an impromptu lesson on impressions that we both had a whole lot of fun with!

Becca LOVES playing with play dough, and she’s finally starting to get good at pushing cookie cutters down into the dough and coming out with shapes of dough. Amazing how difficult that is when your fine and gross motor skills are still developing! So the other day when she was playing, I thought I’d throw something new her way… and handed her a fork. I loved her immediate response when I pressed the fork into the dough. “WOW, Mommy! You made ridges!” And so it began.

First it was the fork, then a little pumpkin bead, then her spiky ball, then a food pouch lid, then a play apple… she took time to press each thing into the play dough to see what response she got from the item, and from the dough. She noticed that the play dough wanted to stick to the spiky ball, but the plastic bead came right out… both left neat impressions. The food pouch lid was just a mess. It left a neat impression, but brought back a bunch of play dough stuck inside. The apple was most disappointing to her – because she did it last, and it’s smooth surface “wiped away my holes!” The spiky ball had left such a neat pattern, and then suddenly it was gone!

It was such a fun lesson, I know she’ll be wanting to do this again soon, so I’m already trying to think of things we can use to make impressions on play dough.

Traveling Art

So, in a continuing effort to give you some more fabulous travel ideas, this is an easy one you can make with stuff you might already have at home, or it could be a fun excuse to head to Target… 😉

You’ll just need a plastic wipes container, a notepad, and a box of crayons! (Oh, and a little bit of adhesive.)

Open the wipes container.

Attach the notepad back to the top of the container.

Dump the crayons in…

and WAH-LAH! Traveling Art box. Great for the car, (if you trust your little with crayons around the car seat…) or great for a restaurant while you’re waiting for your meal (though many restaurants have kid’s menus that can be colored, lots don’t, and it’s small enough to easily throw in the diaper bag!).

Total time to make = about 2 minutes. 🙂 My kind of project!

Ideally, you’d have a blank notepad without lines. I’m still in search of one I like. You could also use sticky notes, but I’d rather use a cheap notepad than spend my precious sticky notes… and also, sticky note stacks start out too fat for this particular wipes container. I love that an entire box of crayons fits, though!! 🙂

Poster Painting

When it comes to crafting, I don’t need much bravery. But when it comes to PAINT + My Toddler…. this Mommy needs more bravery than can possibly exist in one human. But, every time I get up the courage to haul out the paint, it ends up being a super fun time, and I’m always glad that I did it. So, for those of you who need bravery like me, and for those who love to let your little ones paint… here are some fun ideas to experiment with different textures.

Supplies we used: red and yellow washable tempera paint, lots of newspaper (to cover the wood floor), big sheets of white butcher paper, and bubble wrap, dryer balls, a toy car, and a square metal votive holder for painting with.

She first just finger/hand painted, but then she really got into using the car, and then the dryer balls. I was surprised that the bubble wrap wasn’t high on her priority list – since she loves to play with bubble wrap.

Her finished art actually ripped because she decided to walk on it, and put too much paint all in one spot. Still, she was super proud of her art! Once it is totally dry, I’ll cut the paper into a couple of different sections and use them as cards to send to the Grandparents.

To keep myself from over-correcting her, and to truly just let her do what she wanted to do, I did my own painting right next to her. It was super fun, and helped me to relax and just laugh with her. When she was done, she decided to paint most of her body (I had her just in a diaper for this activity), so I carried her to the tub amid a burst of giggles, and we got her all scrubbed up. She enjoyed her impromptu bath, and was so proud to show Daddy her artwork when he got home.

Pumpkin/Halloween Center

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A few weeks ago, I posted about play with orange colored rice. (Here’s that post) And then a few days after that, I took the purple rice I had, and added lavender essential oil. I’ve heard that it has calming properties, and thought – what better thing to add to Becca’s rice? Well, so I added a couple drops too many and the whole house smelled like lavender for two days. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.. just unexpected. To try and combat the strong lavender scent, I mixed the purple rice with the orange, and then let it sit for about a week or maybe even two before we used it. Now, it has a nice lavender scent, but isn’t overwhelming.

I love our water table – such versatility. You can get yours here (aff link). It works great for centers like this because I can fit several activities on the different layers.

I will give a qualifying statement to this post – like I did on my Apple Theme Center – if you are just starting to do sensory activities with your kids, you might not want to take the time or have the energy to put together an entire theme center. THAT IS OK!!! Just pick one or two of these and start there! 🙂

So here’s the big picture – the overview of everything. This center has a high emphasis on math and art, where my Apple center was a combination of Language Arts and Math concepts.

First we’ll look at that sensory rice. Isn’t it pretty? And it fit so well in the top of the water table. I added some fall cookie cutters – they are super fun to sink down and bury in the rice – as well as a variety of sizes of pumpkins that I had collected the past couple of years at Dollar Tree. She definitely likes the cookie cutters the best. She likes to hide them and then dig around to try and find them.

Another fun activity is the pumpkin coloring activity. We went to Michaels and picked up a white craft pumpkin, and I actually introduced this activity with her BEFORE putting it in the center. We talked about how this pumpkin is MADE for coloring, and remembered that other pumpkins we have around the house that are decorations were NOT made for coloring. We also remembered that crayons are only for coloring on paper (and this pumpkin) – not on the table, the couch, the hearth, or any other surface. So I felt confident that I could put this activity in the pumpkin center and allow her to pull it out and take it anywhere to color, without getting crayon everywhere. So far, she has done great with it, and will occasionally just go grab it and go to town coloring! It’s really starting to look cool, and she can definitely take ownership of this and next week, I’ll let her select where she wants to put it to decorate our home!

I also gave her a little pumpkin ice cube tray that I had bought at Dollar Tree – and I added the numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 to reinforce counting by twos. My thought was that she could put one little pumpkin in each space, and count them by twos. She had another idea all together – which reinforces the differences in the way she thinks vs the way I think… and makes me glad I didn’t limit her thinking by telling her what to do with it. She put two grains of rice in each pumpkin on either side of the two, four by the four, six by the six, and up. She actually sat there and counted out ten grains of rice two different times to fill up the “10” pumpkins. Not quite the skill I was hoping to cover, but she kept saying 2,4,6,8,10, so it did end up reinforcing the skill after all.

In addition, I gave her a mesh bag that she could practice putting her pumpkins into (for a gross motor skill of holding a bag open and coordinating the drop to put them in), along with these little black bags for sorting (definitely a much more fine motor skill – these bags are LITTLE). I got this “fall scatter” (shown below) at Michaels for super cheap. She had fun sorting them by color and shape, holding them up to the lights to look through them, and of course, making patterns. (Note: we ended up having to put the acorns away because she kept wanting to pretend she was a squirrel and put the acorns in her mouth, which is of course not safe. She hasn’t done that with the pumpkins. Not sure what it was about the acorns – other than her desire to be a squirrel…)

We also used the cookie cutters, plastic pumpkins, and pumpkin scatter to sort small, medium, and large, and talk about “big, bigger, biggest” and “small, smaller, smallest.” She informed me that NONE of the pumpkins were big, so it wasn’t correct to use those words about these teeny pumpkins, so then we said they were “teeny, teenier, and teeniest.” That was super funny, and giggles ensued.