I said a couple months ago that my plan for art projects in the future would be more "open-ended art" where there is no real outcome in mind. Just provide the kids with interesting (and perhaps unusual) tools and let them just create. I read a good piece of advice from a couple other blogs that I follow: Find joy in the journey. It's not the outcome, it's the process. I also borrowed many of their artistic ideas for our week.
Okay, so that is the plan. And we did have fun! Please consider this when observing some of our final products with a confused expression and a thought in your mind like "what's the point of this?" Just know that my almost three year old is very proud of that picture and he learned that you can use just about anything to create "art"! Oh, and the pictures next to his that look even worse... well, those are mine. :)
We checked out a few books this week to go along with our art theme. One of them being Harold and the Purple Crayon, which we both loved. Here is another:
After reading this book, we got started on our first project: sand art. I set up our little art station down in our unfinished basement on top of a large piece of plastic with a cardtable (with legs folded flat) set on top of a large galvanized tub. It was perfect and I totally didn't worry about making messes. 
We started by squeezing glue all over the paper in whatever design we chose.
Will loves to squeeze glue, so this was an awesome freedom for him.
Next, Will got to choose from six different colors of colored sand and sprinkle it over the glue.
We made sure all the glue got covered and then mommy dumped the excess back into the bag to reveal our finished design. I just did the one with Will's name on it.
Next we began the first of a two-step project called: glue prints. We each squeezed glue all over a new piece of cardstock and then called it a night to let that completely dry.
The next night, we went back down to our glue prints and painted all over the dried glue with colors of choice. I purchased Crayola's 10 pack of 2oz paints and that seems to be just the right size for our amateur works right now. Will pulled on an old sleeveless shirt of daddy's to keep clean.
Then, to create our actual finished product, we took a blank piece of white paper and pressed it down over top of our glue prints and rubbed all over to imprint the colored design.
Will's is red, mine is purple.
Same night, new materials, new project. We took (washed out) old milk lids and bottle caps and "stamped" them into paint and all over a piece of cardstock.
This might have been one of Will's favorite things we did. He told me it "looks like hoola hoops, mommy!" and the proceeded to go get the hoola hoops and play with them.
Finished product:
Next up: feather painting.
Just like it sounds. Here's the finished product:
Reviewing some of our projects so far hanging on the basement walls. Craig is actually planning to finish a part of one side of our basement for a kids' play room, and part of the other side for a work out room. Nothing fancy, but it will add so much more living space to our house!
Moving on to: water paints! This was definitely MY favorite - it's actually very fun and relaxing to just paint with water colors. I bought some special paper specifically for water painting and it was nice heavy duty stuff. This was the set up for our next project, which was in psync with another book we read called Little Blue and Little Yellow by Leo Lionni. A very cute book that uses the imagination and touches on color mixing. I covered up all the other paint colors with masking tape to keep Will focused on blue for the first half of this project. And I cut a hole in a piece of cardstock and taped it down onto our special paper to use as a sort of stencil.
After he finished the blue, I picked up the cardstock and replaced it a little to the right of the blue circle, but slightly overlapping. Then he painted yellow.
Our finished project turned out just like the book cover! Pretty cool! Will really liked this book.
Another attempt with water paints, which wasn't so successful was: magic lines. I put strips of masking tape onto paper and then Will and I completely covered it in blue water paint.
Next, I put a few more strips on going in different, random directions and we moved on to yellow paint. The idea would be that we'd remove the tape and be left with some white, some blue, and perhaps some yellow and a lot of green.
But Will only wanted to paint yellow in a few places, so the finished product wasn't exactly what I had imagined. Oh well, it was another good lesson in color mixing.
Keeping up with our "wiggly lines" book and color mixing concepts, we drew circles and lines all over a couple pieces of paper towels using red and yellow on one and blue and red on another.
Then Will used an eye dropper to drop water onto the paper towel in the hopes that the colors would bleed and blend to make orange and purple.
They did bleed, but not really blend at first.
However, the next day as they dried, the purple at least started to show up a little more.
This was also a favorite: painting with matchbox cars. I smeared some red and blue paint onto two paper plates and we rolled the car wheels into the paint and onto some paper. It's all totally washable, so no harm done to the cars.
After snapping the above two pics, I joined in with a second car and we had a sort of demolition derby going on top of the paper. We crashed into each other, revved our engines and crashed again. He loved it.
Ahh, Mouse Paint. Such a cute book. Another favorite for Will that was requested numerous times. 
We took a large pom pom (fuzzy ball) and "sponged" some red and blue paint onto paper to see if we could create purple spots.
Craig took this one and you can see a little better of our set up. This project also did not turn out as planned, but hey... that's the way it goes sometimes. I wanted to experiment with what would happen if we water painted over top of crayon marks on the water color paper. I thought the waxy crayon marks would sort of repel the water paint, but it didn't really do much. Oh well, we colored and painted and that was still fun.
My picture (on the bottom right) looks semi retarded, but I was just having fun doodling with the water paints over top of my crayon marks. And Will's is on the left. You can see he wasn't much interested in painting this night.
So here's all of our projects this week! I think it's safe to say that my son seems to have a similar interest and talent in art as I do. :) But it can't hurt to keep playing around with it and see if something strikes his interest.
Besides doing art projects this week, we also worked on a couple of our Practical Life assignments from the jar. This one can only really be partially on Will's shoulders because he certainly can't scoot his chair in or out while IN it. I know the Montessori world has children sitting at child-sized tables and chairs where their feet touch the floor and they can be completely independent with it. But we eat together at the dining room table as a family, so that's not practical for us. Will did practice pulling his chair out, getting in and out on his own, and pushing it back into the table before and after meals. (Carpet makes things a bit challenging - LOL.)
And this was the other task we pulled from the jar. We have been doing this for quite some time now so it wasn't really a new assignment. Will hangs his jackets and jammies on the self-adhesive hooks that we placed on the back of his bedroom door within his arms reach. So when we get home in the evenings, he takes off his coat and shoes, hangs up the coat and puts the shoes in his closet. I LOVE this new ability! Makes my life so much easier!
After he finished the blue, I picked up the cardstock and replaced it a little to the right of the blue circle, but slightly overlapping. Then he painted yellow.
Our finished project turned out just like the book cover! Pretty cool! Will really liked this book.
Another attempt with water paints, which wasn't so successful was: magic lines. I put strips of masking tape onto paper and then Will and I completely covered it in blue water paint.
Next, I put a few more strips on going in different, random directions and we moved on to yellow paint. The idea would be that we'd remove the tape and be left with some white, some blue, and perhaps some yellow and a lot of green.
But Will only wanted to paint yellow in a few places, so the finished product wasn't exactly what I had imagined. Oh well, it was another good lesson in color mixing.
Keeping up with our "wiggly lines" book and color mixing concepts, we drew circles and lines all over a couple pieces of paper towels using red and yellow on one and blue and red on another.
Then Will used an eye dropper to drop water onto the paper towel in the hopes that the colors would bleed and blend to make orange and purple.
They did bleed, but not really blend at first.
However, the next day as they dried, the purple at least started to show up a little more.
This was also a favorite: painting with matchbox cars. I smeared some red and blue paint onto two paper plates and we rolled the car wheels into the paint and onto some paper. It's all totally washable, so no harm done to the cars.
After snapping the above two pics, I joined in with a second car and we had a sort of demolition derby going on top of the paper. We crashed into each other, revved our engines and crashed again. He loved it.
Ahh, Mouse Paint. Such a cute book. Another favorite for Will that was requested numerous times. 
We took a large pom pom (fuzzy ball) and "sponged" some red and blue paint onto paper to see if we could create purple spots.
Craig took this one and you can see a little better of our set up. This project also did not turn out as planned, but hey... that's the way it goes sometimes. I wanted to experiment with what would happen if we water painted over top of crayon marks on the water color paper. I thought the waxy crayon marks would sort of repel the water paint, but it didn't really do much. Oh well, we colored and painted and that was still fun.
My picture (on the bottom right) looks semi retarded, but I was just having fun doodling with the water paints over top of my crayon marks. And Will's is on the left. You can see he wasn't much interested in painting this night.
So here's all of our projects this week! I think it's safe to say that my son seems to have a similar interest and talent in art as I do. :) But it can't hurt to keep playing around with it and see if something strikes his interest.
Besides doing art projects this week, we also worked on a couple of our Practical Life assignments from the jar. This one can only really be partially on Will's shoulders because he certainly can't scoot his chair in or out while IN it. I know the Montessori world has children sitting at child-sized tables and chairs where their feet touch the floor and they can be completely independent with it. But we eat together at the dining room table as a family, so that's not practical for us. Will did practice pulling his chair out, getting in and out on his own, and pushing it back into the table before and after meals. (Carpet makes things a bit challenging - LOL.)
And this was the other task we pulled from the jar. We have been doing this for quite some time now so it wasn't really a new assignment. Will hangs his jackets and jammies on the self-adhesive hooks that we placed on the back of his bedroom door within his arms reach. So when we get home in the evenings, he takes off his coat and shoes, hangs up the coat and puts the shoes in his closet. I LOVE this new ability! Makes my life so much easier!
Will also got a lot of practice setting the table and making his bed this week.
Sophie made a few new physical developments this week! She can now climb on and rock the horse as you saw in a previous post. And she's much better about walking whild holding onto just one of our hands. She's taken more of an interest in looking at her books lately and we've been working on identifying some body parts. We'll ask her where her head or belly is and she doesn't show us yet, but loves it when we point to it using her hands. She CAN, however, stick her tongue out for you when you ask her where her tongue is.
Also this week, we spent a lot of time outside whenever it wasn't raining. More tricycle time for Will and more wagon rides for Soph (& Brutus).
We may not have a garden, but we still get to observe and be awwed by the work of planting and growing food with the fields that surround us. Will got to watch the farmers plow and plant this corn field a couple weeks ago. And because we know them, he even got to meet the farmers when they parked their monstrous machines right beside our yard (boy, did Will LOVE that!) and come out to say hello to us while we played in the yard and watched them work. They also wave whenever they see us out.
You can see the beginnings of the corn starting to sprout out of the earth.
But definitely MY favorite crops to watch are the wheat fields. It is like the midwest equivalent to listening to ocean waves. :) Whenever the breeze blows, it is so peaceful to just listen to and watch the wheat field wave. (Especially on warm summer evenings.) This is on the north side of our house.
Will could very happily grow up to be a farmer just like his grandpa and great grandpa.
And this is the corn field from the southwest side of our property.
Back inside, Will plays with his barn and animals.
And later, the train table got some more love.
And that was our week! Stay tuned for next week, which is all about butterflies!
We may not have a garden, but we still get to observe and be awwed by the work of planting and growing food with the fields that surround us. Will got to watch the farmers plow and plant this corn field a couple weeks ago. And because we know them, he even got to meet the farmers when they parked their monstrous machines right beside our yard (boy, did Will LOVE that!) and come out to say hello to us while we played in the yard and watched them work. They also wave whenever they see us out.
You can see the beginnings of the corn starting to sprout out of the earth.
But definitely MY favorite crops to watch are the wheat fields. It is like the midwest equivalent to listening to ocean waves. :) Whenever the breeze blows, it is so peaceful to just listen to and watch the wheat field wave. (Especially on warm summer evenings.) This is on the north side of our house.
Will could very happily grow up to be a farmer just like his grandpa and great grandpa.
And this is the corn field from the southwest side of our property.
Back inside, Will plays with his barn and animals.
And later, the train table got some more love.
And that was our week! Stay tuned for next week, which is all about butterflies! 
1 comment:
Love all your ideas! Next week, if you are doing butterflies, you could do the same type of art project with the paper towels you did this week, except on coffee filters (which should bleed also). Then take pipe cleaners and gather the middle of the filter for the body and antennas of the butterfly.... Just a thought...although it never looks like you need ideas :)
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