Category Archives: Art

Leaf Printing

Leave a reply

Rabbit and I have been planning to do some leaf printing all through the Autumn, but somehow we have never got round to it.  So yesterday morning, when we had some time together while all the boys were out, we decided it wasn’t too late for one more Autumn craft session, before moving on to Christmas crafts.

leaf printing 1

Rabbit really enjoyed organising everything exactly the way she wanted, and having all my attention, though she didn’t really need my help.

leaf printing 2

She loved experimenting with the colours, mixing red and yellow to make orange, and adding glitter glue to brown paint to make it sparkly.

leaf printing 3

When she had finished printing with the leaves, Rabbit painted a picture of a shark in the sea, and then we went to collect Tiddler from Pre-school.  After lunch, we carried on painting, and both the children had fun mixing all the colours together and getting their hands messy.  We had a lovely time, and I think the activity could have easily carried on all day, but we had to tidy up because it was time to go and visit Father Christmas at the Garden Centre.

After painting in the garden most days in the summer, we haven’t had the paints out much this Autumn.  I’m glad we finally got round to it, and the children had such a good time, so I’m going to make sure we don’t leave it so long again.  Winter paintings next week!

Paint, glitter glue and bug hunting

4 Replies

On Wednesday, we had home education group at our house again.  I was anxiously watching the weather, as I had planned a messy painting activity and was hoping to be able to do it in the garden.  Jennie asked earlier in the week if people could do some pink and purple messy play in the week leading up to Matilda Mae’s Mile in Memory walk which is taking place tomorrow, so I stocked up on pink and purple art and craft materials, as well as a multicoloured selection to give the children plenty of choice.  It was cloudy and wet in the morning, but by lunchtime the sun was out, and by the time everyone arrived it was warm enough to be in the garden.  There were five families this time, and a total of fourteen children ranging in age from four weeks to nearly nine years old.

I set up the pink and purple materials in one Tuff Spot and the multicoloured ones in the other.  We had glitter glue, paint, paper, feathers, foam hearts, fabric stars, pipe cleaners, water beads and a few other random bits and pieces.  I also had a big table with an assortment of boxes, cardboard tubes and glue for model-making, and a small table with finger paint and sponges for painting directly on the table as well as on paper.  And inside, I had pencils and paper on the dining room table for anyone who wanted a quiet place to sit and draw.

paint glitter bugs 1

It was a lovely afternoon, the children were busy and happy, the adults had time to chat, the artistic creations were wonderful and there was, as always, a good satisfying mess.  As well as painting and drawing, the children enjoyed climbing and swinging, scooting and riding bikes, and the inevitable bug hunting.  The children were also very excited to find a nest with four eggs in, right inside the “talking bush.”  This is a bush at the bottom of the garden which the children love to play in, and they think it is funny that from the outside we can’t see them so the bush appears to be talking.  By the end of the afternoon, the model-making had become quite elaborate and there is now an extensive and luxurious Matilda Mae Bug Hotel in our garden!  We will always remember Matilda Mae here, even if we show it in unusual ways.

paint glitter bugs 2   paint glitter bugs 3

paint glitter bugs 4  paint glitter bugs 5

paint glitter bugs 6

We are also showing our support for Jennie and her family by walking a Mile in Memory for Matilda Mae tomorrow at the Rare Breeds Centre in Kent.  If you would like to help, you can donate here to support the work of the Lullaby Trust, and you can buy something lovely in the Matilda Mae Memorial Auction which will be launched tomorrow.  Sharing this post, and any of the posts I have linked to, would also help, so please do that too as much as you can.  Thank you.

 

 

Painting stones

Leave a reply

On Saturday, I read Jennie’s post about a brilliant messy art session, which started off with a plan to paint some stones and led to some glorious toddler body art as the twins decided it would be more interesting to paint themselves.  I tweeted Jennie saying “I love this! Wonderful how E and W took it in the direction they wanted to and you let them. Child led play is the best!”

I was thinking about this on Sunday, when I gave Rabbit and Tiddler some paint in the garden while the big boys were at choir.  I suggested that they might paint on the garage doors to start them off, and then waited to see what they would come up with next.  They enjoyed painting the doors, and even painted the handle with black paint.  (Unfortunately I forgot to warn daddy!)  After a few minutes, Rabbit asked if she could paint some stones.  We have quite a good collection of stones, rocks and shells, and they spent a lot of time painting them, and Tiddler also painted a piece of wood.  Monkey joined in when he got back from choir, and then Owl had a go later in the evening.  It didn’t lead to any total body art this time, although Rabbit did paint her hand and made a lovely gold handprint on the table!

More Spring Art and Messy Play

Leave a reply

I was already a little behind on blogging when my laptop finally broke beyond repair last week (it was around 7 years old.)  I have now borrowed a temporary replacement, so I can catch up a bit.  There are so many things that I would like to blog properly, but it is probably not going to happen.  So anyway, these are some of the things we did in the week beginning 11th March.  Having enjoyed experimenting with finger paint, we continued on our theme of writing and drawing with our fingers in a variety of materials.  At the beginning of the week we played with flour, and later in the week repeated the activity with cornflour mixed with water, which was very messy but great fun.

After the success of the daffodil pictures, I decided that we would do some more Spring drawings while we were on a roll.  Our garden has been full of beautiful crocuses for a while, and I brought some of them inside for the children to draw when we had Home Education group at our house.  I’m glad now that we got round to doing it before the snow returned.

We also had fun drawing the blossom tree in our front garden – a lovely springtime activity, though we did need to wrap up warm!  The children sat on a picnic blanket and observed the tree very carefully, taking their time over their drawings.  I think the passers-by were quite amused, by the looks we got, but the children took it very seriously and were proud of the results.  I haven’t taken photos of the drawings yet, so will have to add them later.  I was hoping to draw some more Spring flowers and create another display, but now that everything has been covered in snow again I think we will have to wait a while.

blossom tree 1

Egg box daffodils

6 Replies

We made some egg box daffodils yesterday for our Spring display.

Here’s how to do it.  You will need:

  • An egg box (we used one with twelve sections which was about right for four children.)
  • Some old cereal boxes.
  • Yellow paint, paintbrushes.
  • Scissors, stapler, double-sided tape or PVA glue, normal tape.
  • Green paper (for the stems, if they are for a display.  If you want them to stand up you could use sticks, straws or pipe cleaners.)

Cut the bottom of the egg box into sections, and trim round each one to neaten it as much as possible, but don’t worry too much if they are a little rough around the edges.  Cut petal shapes out of an old cereal box.  You need six for each daffodil.  Paint everything yellow!

When they are dry, arrange 6 petals in the shape of a flower head and staple them at the centre.

Use double sided tape or PVA glue to stick the egg box trumpet to the flower head.

Tape a strip of green paper to the back of the flower head.

These are the finished daffodils, along with our daffodil drawings, on our spring display.

While I was thinking about doing this activity nearly a week ago, I saw a blog post which reminded me to get on with it.  So if you’d like to try another (more detailed) version, have a look here.

Learning through play

4 Replies

The night before last a conversation on twitter got me thinking about learning through play, and in particular messy play activities to support early reading and writing.  So yesterday morning I decided that it was time to get the finger paint out, which I had bought a couple of weeks ago for this purpose.  I scooped some red and green paint out onto paper plates and Monkey and Rabbit spread them around and started exploring the texture.  Tiddler asked for white paint, so I found a black tray to give a more interesting contrast, but he asked for a paper plate so we transferred some of it onto one as well.  Owl came and joined in and for a while all four of them were happily occupied with spreading, squidging and mark making.  Then Owl extended the activity for the others by suggesting colour mixing, so we made brown and pink.  After a while, I suggested they might like to write or draw in the paint, and they wrote several letters, and drew a bus, a train, a sun and some shapes.

We had to stop when it was time for piano lessons, though I’m sure they would have carried on for a lot longer if we’d had the chance.  But it was a special day, as Rabbit joined the big boys and had her first piano lesson.   She did really well and enjoyed it, as did Monkey who is making very good progress, and Owl who was thrilled to start on his Grade 1 pieces after taking his prep test on Friday.  He enjoyed showing the certificate to his teacher, who said that if he got such good comments in Grade 1 he would get a distinction.

Back at home in the afternoon, I offered the children the chance to continue the finger painting activity.  Tiddler was really too tired, and the big boys decided they had had enough painting for one day, so Rabbit and I did it together.  This gave us the opportunity to focus on letter formation, and it was a really satisfying way to practise writing because any mistakes can be quickly “squished” and you can start again.  We did the letters from a to e first, and then m for “mummy”, some capital letters and a number 7!  Rabbit also enjoyed doing hand prints on paper, making “scratchy patterns” with her nails and drawing a spiral shaped fossil.

After snack time (some fruit arranged in a pretty pattern by Rabbit), we did some Maths together.  The boys were working on their times tables, and I decided to set up an “invitation to play” with plasticine for Rabbit.  I started making numbers, but had only made two when Tiddler came over and wanted to sit on my knee and “help” me.  He enjoyed counting the numbers, starting at 1 again every time I made a new one, carefully pointing to each number in turn.  He also self-corrected consistently, going back to the start when he made a mistake.  I knew he could count to ten (at least) but wasn’t sure if he had mastered one-to-one correspondence yet. Well it looks like he has!  While we were doing this, Rabbit came over to watch and I suggested she might like to make some numbers of her own.  She worked very hard to make the numbers 1 to 4 and was very pleased with the results.  She needed a little help to get the 3 to be the right shape, but did the others herself.

At the end of the afternoon, after a little bit of thank-you letter writing, we decided to draw some daffodils for our Spring display.  This was a second attempt, after drawing some flowers last week which were beautiful but didn’t look like daffodils!  This time, we looked carefully at the flowers, and discussed the shape of the petals and the trumpet before we started.  There was some initial reluctance as it seemed quite challenging, but they soon got into it and decided it was fun after all.  Tiddler did not want to be left out so I drew him a flower to colour.  But then he asked me to do the yellow bit for him.  And then the green bit.  However, he did write his name.  It is the yellow squiggle under the picture which you can see if you look really really closely!

Daffodils always make me think of a little boy called Freddie so I’m going to dedicate this post to Merry, and also to Jennie who started the conversation on twitter which made me get round to the finger painting.  Thinking of you and remembering Matilda Mae x

finger painting 26

How my children see me meme

1 Reply

I suppose it’s only fair that I should join in, having laughed at appreciated the others so much.  This meme was started here and I was tagged by Merry.  This is what happened when I asked my children to draw me.  First I asked Tiddler, but he said “No, you draw me!”  So that was that.  Well, he is only two.  Then I asked Rabbit, and she said “Can I draw daddy?”  I managed to persuade her to draw me in the end.  It was touch and go.  She started several attempts and threw them away, so I thought she was going to give up but in the end she drew this.  She even asked me what colour I would like my dress to be.  I think I could live with looking like that.

By Rabbit (aged 4)

Monkey and Owl took it very seriously and spent a long time observing me carefully.  Which meant Supergirl had to start cooking the supper without me in the end as it was getting rather late and every time I tried to move one of them shouted “Stand still!”  They both drew me in the clothes I was actually wearing, which were (as always) jeans and a hooded sweatshirt.  I was impressed by their attention to detail.  Monkey asked me to take off my patterned slippers (too difficult to draw) so he could draw my socks instead.  I did try to explain artistic license, but he wasn’t interested.

By Monkey (aged 6)

When I told Owl the title of the meme, he said “How I see you is with Tiddler clinging to you, which happens quite a lot.”  Poor boy.  It made me want to go and cuddle him, but I wasn’t allowed to move.

By Owl (aged 8)

I’m tagging The Adequate Parent.

Autumn art, volcanoes and more Fimo

2 Replies

I took Owl out for a hot chocolate at the deli yesterday morning, and then to his favourite local shop which sells stationery and toys.  (He used to call it the teeny tiny toy shop until he found out it already had a name!)  He enjoyed telling me all about Lego Ninjago while we were in the deli, and said he might write a book about it, explaining all the characters and themes.  In the shop he then showed me all the Lego kits he and Monkey might possibly like for Christmas, but I was pleased he didn’t asked me to buy any.  He did ask for the Horrible Science Violent Volcano kit, and I bought it mainly because we are learning about Rocks and Volcanoes, and I was intending to make a volcano this week.  I could have done it without the kit, but it would have taken longer!

In the afternoon, we went to our friends’ house for home education group.  The children had fun playing indoors and out, with cars, Lego and a football, and a little bit of pond dipping as well.  They were also offered two lovely Autumn art activities, which Rabbit and Tiddler decided to do.  Rabbit made a tree collage, and then made another one for Tiddler when he changed his mind about doing it, and they both made handprint hedgehogs.

In the evening, Monkey went to Beavers and made a candle holder out of clay.  Owl and I went to collect him and they spent 20p on some random bits of Lego at a fundraising stall which made them both very happy.

Last night, Tiddler woke several times in the night crying, and it seems that his cold has now got worse again.  So we gave his swimming lesson a miss this morning, and had a quiet time at home.  He played quite happily, after a dose of Calpol, and the others did some Maths and English.  I took Rabbit out for a hot chocolate, and to buy some magazines and sweets in the newsagent (the most exciting thing she could think of to do) and then to her swimming lesson.  In the afternoon, after some music practice, we got out the volcano kit.  It was a great success, but Tiddler wandered off and missed it the first time so we did it twice.

       

After that we had another go at Fimo, this time the Create Your Own Space Set.

Following some expert advice involving cocktail sticks and cardboard tubes, the boys managed to produce a rocket that didn’t flop, and Rabbit made a rather lovely star.

 

After that, we did some Bible Reading snuggled up on the sofa. Later on, all the big three did Conquer Maths, and then Rabbit did a bit of her knitting while Owl went off for a treasure hunt in the park with Cubs.  Looking back over the last two days, it is very clear to see the benefits of having Supergirl here with us.  We have done so much with so little stress and it has all been lovely and calm.  I am feeling very lucky and thankful!

Sometimes it just works…

Leave a reply

        

I love painting with the children, but I have to be in the right mood, and we haven’t done it for a while.  It’s one of the many things I think we “should” do more often, and wonder how I manage to make life so complicated that we can’t find time to do it.  Isn’t that why we are home educating, after all?  It can seem impossible at times to get organised and make sure everything runs smoothly, including the clearing up, so that everyone has a good time and it is not too stressful.  I often think we need to stop going out so much, so that we have time at home for activities like this, and wonder if I need to plan them to make sure they happen.

However, there are times when everything falls into place without planning, everyone is in the right mood and it seems so simple.  On Sunday after we had been out to lunch at our local Italian restaurant, we came back and sat in the garden while the children played.  They were in a good mood, and we had Granny with us which helped to keep things nice and calm, so we took the easel outside and got the paints out.  The little three were busy for a long time painting on the easel with brushes, finger painting at a low table and painting with their feet on a roll of wallpaper.  Owl didn’t join in this time because he was busy sawing wood using his own tools and daddy’s workbench.

After Sunday’s success, I even managed to get the paints out again today with three extra small children around.  The little ones enjoyed easel painting (including the easel itself as well as the paper), painting cardboard boxes, paper plates and polystyrene cups and painting on themselves (and their clothes), while Owl and Monkey painted on the garage wall.  It was fun, the mess wasn’t too bad, and I WILL do it more often.  It is only fair to add that Suburban Dad has come home from his first day back at work and spent a large part of this evening washing up the paint pots and brushes which got mixed up with the dishes somehow, in a chaotic supper time for seven children, during which water came pouring through the kitchen ceiling – but that’s another story…