sandbox bliss

painting on a canvas

In the classroom, we give the children their own canvas for their birthday to create a classroom painitng. These are displayed in the classroom until the end of the year and are a classroom collaboration. One way to control the painting without controlling it is to designate tools for specific colors. The birthday kiddo picks the paleete and does the basework. The next kiddo picks a color and a tool and adds to it, and so on. Once a tool is used, we remove it from the mix. We've usd paintbrushes of all sizes, rollers, tubes, bowls, q-tips, sponges, spray bottles and more. The end results are really fun and colorful without being muddy. Now, mind you, outside of the birthday canvas, the children have access to all the colors and materials they wish to use so there are plenty of painting opportunies that are truly process oriented. I have had children grab an ENORMOUS sheet of paper only to add three tiny brushstrokes in one corner, others will begin by painting an awesome picture of stripes and dots only to paint all over it with all the colors until it's a big brown mess. It's cool, it's their art and they love it. I love it too!

wayne thiebaud for preschoolers

I've always loved the idea of introducing preschoolers to artists. I live in a small community with no access to a large-scale art museum so no field trips for us. Instead, I try to introduce artists to the kiddos that tie in with the literature we are reading. For years, we read Jan Brett's Gingerbread Baby, and I thought it would be a perfect link to the art of Wayne Thiebaud what with all the sweets.

One way of introducing the artists to the children to to set up an "art shelf" whith a variety of manipulatives, pictures of the artist, a book of their art, and small prints of their work if you can find them (postcards work great for this).

I've done shelves for a variety of artists, this is what we had on our Thiebaud shelf.

Top shelf, left to right:

candy themed memory game from eBoo

a book of Thiebaud's art

laminated postcards of his art

another book of Thiebauds art

cupcake and sweets themed lacing activity

Bottom shelf, left to right:

ice cream scoop game

handmade bubblegum magnet activity

this super fun cake balance game

scenes from the classroom: november

tiny pumpkins

fine motor work

sensory play

doctor's office play

watercolors and pipettes

monochromatic collage jars

mixing up pudding

the art table

flower experimentation

shoofly pie?

Our first Nursery Rhyme this new school year was Baby and I. After the children had learned it, we spent some time talking about the rhyme. One of the questions I asked was "What kind of pie?" And I have to admit, the children just sat there and looked at me. Crickets, I tell ya! Chirp.....chirp...chirp...so I asked again and added "Apple pie? Chicken pot pie? Shoo fly pie?" and with that they all piped up "Shoo fly pie!" After much discussion, we decided to make "shoo fly pie" but not the traditional kind, our kind.

Upon discussion. The children decided that shoo fly pie had peanut butter, apples, bananas, chocolate chips, and powdered sugar in it...and so we made shoo fly pie!

The children cut and chopped bananas and apples. One of our parents helped us caramelize them in our tiny electric skillet. As the caramelization magic was happening the children took turns adding peanut butter to our graham cracker crust.

Next we added the sticky hot fruit and sprinkled chocolate chips over the glorious goo!  With a flip of their wrists, the children dusted the top of the pie with powdered sugar. Skills they learned included safely using a real butter knife to cut fruit, cleaning up their work stations, respecting the heat of the skillet, using pinching fingers to drop chocolate chips onto the pie, and how to slowly dust the whole shebang with sugar. They also learned a lot of new words...

Not to mention we made an awesome pie! It may have looked like a hot mess but good golly, did we eat every last bite and by we, I mean ALL of us...parents, kiddos, and teachers! We love cooking in our classroom!

scenes from the classroom: october

wiffle balls and pipe cleaners

birdseed in the sensory tub

painting with feathers

natural geo-board turned hammering boards

making nests

paint with straws

windy art via Handmade Kids Art blog

My co-teacher found this nifty project on Handmade Kids Art blog and was so taken with it, she tried it out with her class. I was so taken with it, we did it in my class as well. The children really enjoyed it!

The first step is to imagine what the wind would look like if you could see it. The children used markers to show what their wind would look like.

Next up, the children selected a paint color and squirted it onto their tray and used their fingers to replicate what they drew on their papers.

After they used their fingers to draw the wind on their trays, they flipped their paper onto the paint, marker side down, to pull a print. We give them the vocabulary such as print pulling, etc. to let them know their art is valid. Once they pull their print, they use glue to adhere three dimensional elements of wind such as yarn and feathers.

Aren't they happy? It was very interesting to watch the children follow the steps to their own tune. The dialog that went on was a lot of fun as well. Thank you Handmade Kids Art for sharing your projects!  

getting a little themey with apples

Everyone brought an apple to school for tasting. We used our "octopus" slicer to cut the apples into eight pieces that we then cut with butter knives to share. After much deliberation and sampling, the kiddos graphed their name in the column of the color apple they liked the best.

 

Next up, more chopping of apples that were then mixed into a homemade batter to make apple muffins. We used the recipe in the back of Apple Farmer Annie. Not one crumb was left. Yum! 

Lastly, we did a three step apple tree painting. The kiddos used a paintbrush to paint their trunk, a bath sponge for the leaves, and their fingers for the apples. Later we talked about the many ways you could paint an apple tree. Some of the children continued on to draw trees with markers, and paint trees at the easel. It was a lot of fun, themey or not!

ice play

We dumped a large bag of ice into our sensory bin, then added a couple of cups of liquid watercolor with eye droppers. This entertained the kiddos for almost an hour!