10 Second Tip

Repurpose a glass jar by painting it in sections with Mod Podge (or watered down white glue) and sticking on colored tissue pieces. C made a baby food jar into a votive candle holder. They make lovely vases too.

10 Second Tip

Tape markers to toy cars and they become cars that drive and draw! It's even more fun when the paper stretches out long like a highway. Try taping several together.

10 Second Tip

While paint is wet, sprinkle kosher salt on watercolors and to add a sparkly textured effect to the finished artwork. It will soak up the watercolors! Or stir salt into tempera paint before painting to change the sensory experience.

What's it shaping up to be?

I cut shapes out of construction paper in a variety of colors and sizes. I challenged C "Can you make a sailboat? A house? A tree?" and he arranged the shapes to his interpretation. I also took a turn creating and asked C to guess as I added shapes to see how quickly he could figure out what I was making. C also created freely and had me guess what he'd made.

*Variation: Once you've made an arrangement you like, glue it down on another piece of construction paper for an art piece.

10 Lessons the Arts Teach

A must-read about the benefits of teaching the arts to children:

National Art Education Association 10 Lessons Handout
SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications.

Bubble Painting

Add food coloring OR liquid watercolor OR tempera paint drops to bubble solution and blow bubbles over a piece of paper. The bubbles POP! and leave behind colorful traces of circles and spatter.

*Variation: Use a straw to blow into a container of bubbles and let them bubble up and over the top, onto a sheet of paper.

*Variation: Use a straw and blow into the bubble solution to form a mountain of bubbles and lower a piece of paper down onto the bubbles.

10 Leaf Activities

1. Arrange them on clear contact paper and seal with another sheet to make a placemat or window hanging

2. Leaf rubbings

3. Spread glue on paper and sprinkle on crushed leaves for a mosaic look

4. Cover leaves with light fabric (muslin works well) and pound with a hammer

5. Gather a collection of leaves and create a leaf monster or creature

6. Paint on one side of the leaf with watercolor and press on paper to leave a print

7. Paint the vein side with fabric paint and press onto a t-shirt

8. Catch leaves as they fall out of the tree

9. Gather two of each leaf and set up a matching game

10. Sing a leaf song

WELCOME AUTUMN

To the tune "London Bridge"

Autumn leaves are falling down, falling down, falling down,

autumn leaves are falling down,

welcome autumn.

Sweep the leaves and put them here, put them put here, put them here,

Sweep the leaves and put them here,

welcome autumn.

Jump right in and have some fun, have some fun, have some fun,

Jump right in and have some fun,

welcome autumn.

Tasty Toasty

You will need: Bread, milk, food coloring, q-tips, 4 paper cups or small dishes, toaster

Put a small amount of milk in each cup. Add two drops of food color to each cup. Using the q-tip (or a new/cleaned paintbrush) "paint" a design onto the bread with the colored milk. Toast and eat your masterpiece.

*Variation: Paint on a message before serving toast with a meal.

Foil Prints

Crumple a piece of foil slightly then unfold. Paint directly onto the foil and press a paper over the design to capture a print.

P.S. That is glitter paint.

P.P.S. The kids may want to keep the shiny painted foil too. Bonus: Two pieces of art in one!

*Variation: What happens if you try crumpled saran wrap or waxed paper?

Making Colored Noodles

Materials: Noodles, zip top baggies, food coloring, rubbing alcohol

1. Decide on what kind of noodles you want to use. To make noodle jewelry, find pasta with a hole in the center.

2. Use as many zip top bags as colors you want.

3. Place the desired amount of noodles into each bag.

4. Pour just enough rubbing alcohol in the bag so all the noodles are covered.

5. Add a generous amount of food coloring to each baggie of noodles.

6. Put the bags of noodles aside and let them sit until they are the desired color-- the longer they sit, the brighter the colors.

7. Remove from the baggies and spread in a single layer on paper towels to dry.

8. Craft away!

DO NOT EAT. It may take hours for coloring and up to 24 hours to dry. Store in an airtight container for future use.

*Variation: Colorations® Liquid Watercolors work to dye noodles as well.

Arts & Crafts Gift Buckets

Here's a gift idea that encourages imagination and creativity. It would make a nice birthday gift or party favor! While I like Discount School Supply, a great time to pick up the "stuffings" would be during back to school sales.

Arts & Crafts Gift Buckets

P.S. Discount School Supply is one of my favorite online stores for materials!

It Looked Like Spilt Milk

Just want to recommend a book that might inspire a few activities this summer. It's called "It Looked Like Spilt Milk" by Charles G. Shaw and published by HarperFestival.

*Extension: Cloud watching.

*Extension: Paint white paint on blue paper and then fold it in half. What does it look like now?

Color INSIDE the Box

**Set a large cardboard box in the middle of the living room for their discovery, with a box of crayons inside. Watch what happens next!**

Sun Prints

**Arrange a few interesting items on black construction paper and leave in the sun for about 1 hour. The sun will fade the paper leaving nice prints behind.**

Berry Basket Weaving

**Once you've enjoyed some summer berries (dipped in vanilla yogurt?), recycle the container by weaving pretty ribbons throughout.**

Share recycling with your children.
Is this the world you want to leave them?

Slide Painting

Today we did slide painting. I covered the slide with butcher paper and extended it about 6 feet out and we dipped various items in tempera paint and rolled them down. I let the kids select items too based on what they thought would roll. Some of the more interesting prints came from a plastic hair curler, a golf ball, and a pinecone. It was a collaborative group effort but you could cut the finished product into squares to save or send home.

I Recommend...Fiskars brand scissors

As a parent and early childhood educator, I trust Fiskars for my children's scissoring needs.

http://www.fiskars.com/content/school_en_us/School/whyfiskars/teacher+knows+best

Pre-Cutting Activities

Strengthen your child's scissoring skills with some simple ideas:

1. The wooden clothespins (the kind that do NOT pinch open and sort of look like little soldiers) slide easily onto the lid of a container-oatmeal, frosting, box...make up a game?

2. Squeeze clothespins

3. Playdough, cutting playdough with scissors

4. Real clay with clay tools and hammers

5. Sort pom-poms or manipulatives

6. Finger plays, hand and finger puppets

7. Tear paper (torn paper collage)

8. Snip or fringe paper

To encourage proper grip on the scissors, make up a little tune and repeat this

Thumb on the top

Fingers on the bottom

Keep your elbow in

Responding to Children's Artwork

Sometimes I find myself in a rut of responding to children’s artwork with “Oh, that’s pretty!” Do you catch yourself doing that too? How boring it must be to hear that again and again! Asking “What is it?” implies that what they created must represent something but the child may have been exploring a media or expressing a mood. When we make more specific comments, we let children know we are really looking at the picture, and not judging it. Try these:

“Is there a story that goes with your picture?”
“You made some interesting color combinations with the paint.”
“Can you show me a red line?” (Describe what you see in the artwork.)
“Where would you like your name?” (Spell it aloud as you print.)
“These shapes must have been tricky to make.”
“How do the curvy lines make you feel?”
“You worked really hard to cover the whole paper.”

Stages of Art Development - The Universal Tadpole

Do your preschooler's drawing of people look somewhat like the form above? Right on! This is what I would expect from a preschooler developmentally. Your child is drawing "universal tadpoles!" When children all over the world are asked to draw a person at this stage, the same general form appears. Some sort of roundish blob with arms and legs and sometimes a face. It starts as a simple blob and lines and as the child develops you'll get more and more human details.

For fun, you can ask your child "Can you show me where the belly button is?"

"By understanding the developmental stages children progress through when drawing, you will be able to allow your child to express themselves spontaneously (Kellogg, 1969)."

· Ages 2 -3--scribbling. All children, regardless of their culture, make the same markings, in the same way at approximately the same age.
· Ages 2-4--scribbles take shape and look like circles, ovals, squares, triangles and crosses.
· Ages 3-5--children begin to make designs from the shapes they have been drawing.
· Ages 4-5--designs take on the form of people
· Age 5-6--children are at the pictorial stage

When parents understand the various stages all children go through, they will know it’s the child's first step in the developmental process of learning to draw.

Page 3 of the following shows pictures of the developmental stages in early childhood art. http://www.crayola.com/educators/media/successGuides_ece.pdf