Children's Art Group Kickoff Event

I'm so excited with how the first event for my Children's Art Group went. We had 15 moms (and a couple of dads) come out with a whole bunch of children! They ranged in age from babies up to about five years old.

Our first activity was painting without paintbrushes. Each family brought a couple of bottles of washable tempera paint and a few items from around the house with interesting texture. We painted with feathers, pine cones, potato mashers, spatulas, flowers, a metal basket, dryer balls, toilet paper tubes, and lots of other fun things!

The kids had so much fun! I have a few other projects in the works for our local art group. I can't wait until the next one!

Children's Art Group

So... I finally did it. I've been playing around with this idea for several months, and I finally jumped in with two feet and it's happening! I have officially started a children's art group here in our area. If you live near me, check it out!!

I've set it up on meetup.com. It's a pretty easy-to-use social tool to create events in your community.

Anyway, it hasn't been announced to the meetup community at large yet (it will be tomorrow), but I already have 18 members. Our first event is this Sunday. We're having a No Paint Brush Painting event. At the moment, there are 11 mamas and 14 children attending.

I'm planning to spread out some old sheets or drop cloths on the ground for the kids to paint on. I got some paint trays at the Dollar Tree for washable tempera paint. Each parent will supply 1 or 2 bottles of paint and some items with interesting texture to paint with. It should be a blast! And probably a little bit messy too.

I'm hoping to plan about 2 events per month. They will primarily take place on the weekends so working moms and dads can participate too. I have 2 events up on the calendar for August, and I've already planned September and October. I still have some thinking I need to do as far as location during the winter. The next few events will take place outside at local parks. I'm hoping maybe the art center or a church might donate some space to us at least once a month. Otherwise, I might have to clean out my basement and limit the number of attendees.

Anyway, I'm really excited about the group. And you'll definitely be seeing some more posts as the events take place.

Homeschool Preschool: Butterflies

Little O just turned two last month, and I've started some homeschool projects with her. Nothing really organized or overly adventurous. I just want to help foster her natural curiosity and desire to learn about everything around her.

We did some winter playdough, winter painting, and Valentine's Day playdough cookies earlier this year.

Since Spring is in the air, I thought it would be fun to do a unit about this season. Then I was inspired by Shaunna over at Fantastic Fun and Learning to focus on butterflies during the next week.


Literacy:
We started the week off by browsing our bookshelf and the library for butterfly-themed books. We read these books all throughout the week.

Books We Read:
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
Butterfly Colors and Counting by Jerry Pallotta and Shennen Bersani
Caterpillar Spring and Butterfly Summer by Susan Hood and Claudine Gevry
Goodnight, Sweet Butterflies: A Color Dreamland by Dawn Bentley

Math:
Little O is starting to learn to count. Her favorite number is two. And she usually counts by touch each object and repeating two, two, two. It's pretty cute. I kind of like that she's learning the concept of counting individual objects rather than just memorizing the order of the numbers. It makes me feel like the concept is there. Maybe it's just me. :)

I know there are other areas of math for toddlers besides counting. Sometimes I have a hard time coming up with what they are. However, with butterflies, it was easy. Symmetry. Butterflies are the same on both sides.

So, I created this Color Matching Butterfly Printable to help Little O learn about symmetry. I cut each butterfly in half, and her job was to match each side to its mate. I added the letters for use at a later time. I think she's still a bit too young for letter recognition.

I also found these fun Butterfly Matching Cards from PreKinders. For Little O, we just matched a few of the butterflies to their twin. Down the road, we'll add more or even play a Memory Game with them.

Art:
We took the idea of symmetry to our artwork this week. We made these Butterfly Blotter Prints.

And, because Little O loves to craft, we had to add in just one more craft project! We took scraps of tissue paper (leftovers from random Christmas and birthday gifts throughout the years) and glued them to a picture of a butterfly. This project helped Little O work her fine motor skills, using her pincer grasp to pick up each piece of tissue paper. And she got to use glue for the first time. Fun!

Outside:
The obvious choice here would be to go on a butterfly hunt outside. However, it's still a bit cold for butterflies in our neck of the woods. I thought about planting seeds for a butterfly garden (and I still might), but I didn't think Little O would make the connections since it would take too long for the butterflies to actually show up.

So instead, we put on some costume wings that I found at the Dollar Tree, and pretended to be butterflies flying around our backyard. Woohoo! Gross motor skills!

We didn't get a chance to take a field trip up to the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum to check out the Judy Istock Butterfly Haven. We're definitely going there in the next few weeks. (I had no idea it was there, and we get in FREE with our Children's Museum pass). I wish we could have made it there this week, but it just didn't work out.

I hope you enjoyed our butterfly activities! I love comments, so please tell me what you think and what you're doing with your little one.

Butterfly Color Matching Printable

Little O has been fascinated with colors lately. She likes to name the color of everything she sees. "Blue shirt." "Black car." "Green grass." And on and on.

Keeping her interests in mind, I created this Butterfly Color Matching Printable to go with a homeschool preschool unit on butterflies. It's perfect since Spring is making its appearance known around here.

I printed the butterflies out on white card stock and cut out each square. Then I followed the dotted line to cut each butterfly in half. She's a little young for letter recognition, but I plan on using these butterflies in the future when she's ready (and of course adding other letters as well). For now, the goal is for Little O to match each side of the butterfly with its mate.

While we played, we worked on naming each color. I included the colors she knows (red, orange, blue, black, and purple) and a few she doesn't. I also added a variation on blue and purple (aqua and lavender). I thought it would be nice for her to see different shades within the same color family.

During play, I set out three halves at a time. I asked her to name each color. Then, I held up one of the matches, and she placed it with its mate. She did great matching the colors. The most difficult part of the game turned out to be figuring out how to place each card to make it look like a butterfly. This became especially challenging if I switched which side I placed on the floor in the first place.

I hope you and your little one enjoy this activity.

I absolutely love comments, so I'd love to hear from you about how you used this printable!

Easter Sensory Bin

Little O really loves sensory bins. We made one for Easter last week. I dyed rice in four different colors. It's really easy to dye your own rice or noodles for sensory play. I found directions over at Play, Create, Explore.

After making the rice, I added plastic Easter eggs (two different sizes) and some plastic serving spoons. I got both the eggs and the spoons at the Dollar Tree.

Little O just loved playing with this sensory bin. She scooped the rice with spoons and filled some of the eggs. We closed the eggs and shook them to hear the rice rattle around.

Because this is a messy sensory bin (the rice has a tendency to exit the bin) I placed a sheet under the bin. It caught most of the rice, and when she was done playing I just used the sheet to pour the rice back into the bin for later.

I know it's over, but this colored rice could be used for so much more than just Easter. I hope everyone had a nice Easter. We sure did!

Valentine's Day Playdough Cookies

I wanted another opportunity to play with the white winter playdough again. We've already made snowmen with it, and Little O has played with it independently at her desk. I decided to pull out the same accessories we used for the snowmen and add some circle and heart-shaped cookie cutters. Little O couldn't get the hang of rolling the playdough flat, but she enjoyed mushing it with her hands and ripping it apart. Great work to develop those fine motor skills!

Once I rolled my dough flat, she was interested in helping push the cookie cutters into it. I cut out two circles and two hearts for each of us to play with. I wound up with one heart and one circle, and she got the rest.

I made sure she could reach the decorating supplies: buttons, sequins, heart-shaped sequins, bows, and googly eyes. Then I started decorating mine.

She got the idea pretty quickly. She really liked the small, multicolored sequins. She grabbed handfuls at a time and sprinkled them onto her cookies.

She also enjoyed taking the supplies out of the box and putting them in a pile. I had to let go of my OCD tendencies for this. It is Ok that she mixed the sequins and the googly eyes. It's is.

In the end, this is what we wound up with. They are not beautiful, Pinterest-perfect playdough cookies. But they are perfect to Little O and to me. Process. Not product.

Happy Crafting!

Winter Themed Painting

Little O loved painting snowmen so much the other day that she asked to paint immediately after breakfast this morning. I didn't want to do the exact same painting that we did before because I want to keep it fresh and new for her. Plus, if we do different things with paint, it will keep her occupied for longer.

This time we used blue construction paper and white and blue tempera paint. I didn't water it down at all because I wanted the paint to be opaque.

 While we painted, we talked about winter, snow, and snowmen. I reminded her of the snowmen we painted and the ones we made out of playdough.

 I painted a snowman next to her, and I told her that I made the body using circles. She said he needed eyes (one of her newest words is "eyes"), so I painted on eyes, a nose, and a mouth with blue paint. I added buttons and arms too.

 

Finally, I wanted her to try a different technique with her paintbrush. She spent most of her time brushing on the paint in smooth strokes. I told her I wanted my picture to look like it was snowing. So I started dotting paint on the background. She started doing the same ( her dots are large in the upper left corner). She decided to liked to brush the paint on better, so she went back to that. Hey, at least she tried it, right?

This was a quick, fun painting activity. Little O seemed to really enjoy it. I'm sure we will be busting out the paints again soon. I think this may be the first time we've painted together on colored paper.

Painting Over Crayons & Markers

Little O is still feeling a bit under the weather, so I've been scrambling to come up with ideas to keep her quietly engaged. We've already explored playdough, although I think I'll pull that out again later this week as she really enjoyed it. Yesterday I thought a simple coloring activity would be a good thing to try during the witching hour (you know... after nap but before dinner time).

We started with simple printable snowman that I found on Pinterest. I added the letter S and the word Snowman on the page. She wanted to use both crayons and markers. She had Daddy add the eyes to hers. Normally, we don't draw on her paper because we want her to feel empowered to create her own work. However, eyes is one of her newest words, so when she said it, of course we indulged her.

She finished with the crayons and markers rather quickly (I didn't even get any pictures of this portion), but she wasn't quite ready to be done with crafting. I thought it was the perfect opportunity to reintroduce paint to Little O. I couldn't wait to see what she thought of the reactions the crayons and markers had with the paint. We used blue and green tempera paint that I watered down quite a bit. I wanted the crayon and marker to still show.

The crayons created a crayon resist (I'm not sure she really noticed), but the markers started to bleed and smear because they are washable. She definitely noticed this.

After she finished painting her picture, she painted Mommy's and Daddy's as well. She enjoyed painting so much that she asked to do it again today right after breakfast. I'll share the Winter Themed Painting tomorrow.

Winter Playdough Fun

Yesterday, Little O woke up with the beginnings of a cold. Ugh. Pete and I decided we better play it safe and stay home so we didn't spread it to all our friends. We needed something to do that would keep Little O quiet and happy. Playdough, of course!!


I whipped up a batch of our favorite no-cook playdough. I decided to keep it white this time since we're playing with all things winter right now (winter sensory bin, snow man counting, snowflake sorting, etc.). So with our white playdough, we decided to make snowmen. I had a whole bunch of accessories to decorate our snowmen up in my craft room. Buttons, sequins, fabric strips, pipe cleaners, beads, jingle bells, googly eyes, and mini bows. I brought them down and introduced them to Little O.

I made a traditional snowman (with a bow because I wanted her to be a girl), Pete made a snowmonster.

Little O made her own version. She used googly eyes at first, but switched them out for buttons later. She also used some brown pipe cleaners and skewered her snowman. They sort of look like arms!

 After a while, we started talking about all the animals that live in the snow. Little O is obsessed with anything animal lately (well, always, really). So I made a polar bear. She said and signed bear. And Pete made a penguin.

We had so much fun as a family with this activity. I've kept all the accessories downstairs so we can create more snow animals with white playdough this week. I'm also thinking we should make pretend sugar cookies and decorate them with sequins and glitter. Check out some of our other winter-themed activities here.