Once upon a time (about exactly a year ago), I forked out a relatively small amount of dosh for some chunky toddler fairy stampers and a red stamp pad. When I got home, I looked at the new stamp pad, and realised that fairies aren’t always red. And I thought ‘I could totally DIY different coloured versions of this myself’. (I was a bit unsure about the whole ‘making things from scratch without a tutorial’ thing back then…)
So I googled, found enough examples to reassure me, and headed off to the discount shops to buy some thin kitchen sponges (the cheaper the better), some plastic containers with lids (why didn’t I use recycled??) and some acrylic paint.Continue readingValentines Stamp Art for Toddlers (with sensory play)
Spring Nature Art for preschoolers: Learning about and painting with the flora of our neighbourhood
As the weather becomes cooler in the Northern Hemisphere, Pinterest and Facebook feeds become flooded with ‘Fall’ activities. But for us folks that live downunder, the weather is becoming warmer, the flowers are blooming, and the promise of an endless Summer is in the air…
So to celebrate all things Spring, a group of incredible Australian bloggers are coming together in a Spring Blog Hop, with each blog featuring a different Spring-inspired kids activity every day.
In the Banya household we’ve been taking advantage of the fantastic Spring weather by going on long neighbourhood nature walks every day, singing as we go…
Walking along, looking around. Looking up, and looking down. You never know what you’ll see. Look over here, what can it be? What’s that lying next to the footpath?
As we walk we search for treasure. Sometimes it’s an unusual looking flower, sometimes it’s a smooth stone, sometimes it’s a bumpy seed pod.
Here’s what we found one morning.
JJ and I are still learning the names of our local flora – I’ve labelled the ones that I know (so far).
Our house rule is that JJ is allowed to pick flowers, leaves, seed pods etc from plants and trees along the nature strips, as long as there are plenty of other flowers left on the tree or bush for other people to enjoy. She’s also free to collect anything that has fallen to the ground.
When we get home, we look up the names of what we have collected. We have a large botanical book on our coffee table that we like to leaf though (hehe).
Here’s a close up of some of our Australian natives. Gorgeous aren’t they!!
Granny and Pop were visiting on this particular day. After lunch Granny and JJ began an unstructured art and craft session using some paint and most of our nature finds. There was no particular outcome in mind, just the pleasure of spending time creating with loved ones on a glorious Spring afternoon. It’s lovely watching Granny and JJ chatting away as they ‘work’.
JJ started off by painting on the big beige leaves. Granny suggested using the peg to hold it down – much easier! They used the same trick to paint the fern fronds.
And by gradually added a splash of paint here and a sprinkle of flowers there, they built up a beautiful work of art, layer upon layer.
And here it is! Their finished masterpiece…
There was painting, colour mixing and learning new art techniques. There were nature discoveries – new flora, shapes and textures. There was bonding, developing intergenerational relationships that last a lifetime.
And you might be wondering what Bee and Pop were doing while Granny and JJ’s crafting fiesta was going on? Oh they were just lounging around…
Would you like to see some more Aussie Spring ideas? “Hop” over to some of these fun Aussie kid blogs to see what they’ve been up to. I promise you’ll like what you find. 🙂
One of my blogging friends, Kylie from Octavia and Vicky, tragically lost her dear brother Ryan recently.
To honour Ryan, and allow Kylie time away from blog pressures to mourn, we’ve guest posting on Kylie’s blog with JJ & Bee’s Lego Painting… Please pop on over and check it out, and lend Kylie your support.
Halloween is a funny holiday in Australia. Some people celebrate, some don’t.
Last year I noticed several houses in our street put out Halloween decorations to let the neighbourhood kids know that they were a trick-or-treating friendly house. Thus the hoards knew which houses to knock on and which houses to avoid (lest they end up being given a mouldy old apple by dear old Beryl Witherberry).
So when JJ (3 years and 3 months) begged me to buy saw this pumpkin last week, I thought it would do a great job of advertising our trick-or-treating friendliness to the neighbourhood. But of course it had to be decorated first! It’s the first time we’ve attempted pumpkin decorating. I asked JJ to draw on the pumpkin, similar to how we made our Orange Faces and Spooky Orange Faces. As we were gifted with some FooDoodler edible markers only a few weeks ago, I thought this would be a great first project to try them out.
Off her own bat, JJ decided to draw a “scary-funny” face. (Scary-funny is a term I coined last year to try to prevent Halloween nightmares, and it’s kinda stuck.)
She drew two eyes (with pupils) and a zig zag mouth. Then she walked around the pumpkin, drawing similar faces on each of the four “sides”.
JJ still holds her pen in a fist most of the time, so I’m looking for opportunities to work on improving her pencil grip, pre-writing skills and fine motor skills. This sort of play makes for excellent practise in a fun, unpressured and meaningful context.
After drawing the four faces, JJ decided that the pumpkin needed a zigzag around the stem area, and then started to draw little squiggles using each of the colours, before declaring the project finished.
I noticed that the markers took a second or two to dry, and so they smudged in places where JJ had touched them immediately after drawing. But otherwise they did a pretty good job.
And yay! We now have a cute quirky little pumpkin to decorate our front porch for Halloween!
I’m planning to take JJ and Bee trick-or-treating for half an hour or so along our street in the early afternoon, so I made this Please Take Just One sign so other trick-or-treaters don’t miss out while we’re not at home.
I’ll put it with a mix of lollies and non-food treats (including my spooky eye-balls) so kids can choose whichever they prefer.
And I also made this Sorry We Are Out Of Treats sign below just in case the demand is much higher than expected. I’m hoping that we don’t have to use it! This will be a worst case scenario – I think I’ll donate JJ’s collected treats to the cause before resorting to this…
Now it’s your turn. Are you Halloween-ing this year? How many people are you expecting to knock on your door? What are you dressing up as? Do you have any special traditions? And does anyone have a good post-Halloween pumpkin recipes
xx Danya
(PS: Just disclosing that we received these FooDoodler edible markers as a no obligation gift. All opinions are my own.)
Painting with vehicles provides children with a new way to play and create using old toys.
As a mother of girls, I’m conscious of providing opportunities to play with a wide range of toys, including those that might be considered ‘boy’ toys.
A while ago, I bought a bunch of second-hand vehicles from eBay for the princely sum of $1.15. They were mismatched, but everything still worked. They just needed new children to play with.
Both girls play with them quite regularly. Bee (my thirteen month old) is starting to say “CAH!” (car) and loves to make a ‘vroom vroom’ sound as she drives toy cars and trucks across the floor. We’ve also played with cars and ramps, watching them roll away and crawling after them.
JJ (my three year, four month old) loves to play with vehicles too. She likes diggers, cement trucks, cranes, trains – you name it! She’s just adopted a green racing car as a particular favourite toy, whom we’ve named “Ben 10”, as she’s picked up on a love of Ben 10 and green cars from the boys at her new preschool (even though she’s never seen the TV show).
But on this particular day, I decided to introduce vehicle play in a different way, using vehicles as a painting tool.
I set up an invitation to play, using red finger paint (for the extra viscosity) and a random assortment of vehicles, and waited to see her reaction.
When JJ ran outside a little later on, and practically skidded to a halt, as she paused to take in the set up in front of her. She picked up the train carriage, hovered it over the paint and then looked at me cheekily for reassurance.
Grinning, she said “We’re not opposed (supposed) to put it in paint Mummy.”
I replied “Today I thought we could have some fun using the paint and the vehicles together. We could make a painting.”
And she let out a tiny squeal and made her first track marks…
She tentatively tried out each of the vehicles one by one, dipping them in the paint first and then rolling them on the paper. She rolled each one over the same spot, creating tracks, on tracks, on tracks.
After a while she asked for more vehicles, a great sign that she was enjoying herself. Yay!
And not long afterwards she asked for some paint in a different colour. She chose yellow (which I mixed up from tempura powder this time). The resulting play made for some great colour mixing conversations. “I wonder what will happen when you mix the red and the yellow together. Oh look, it’s gone a bit orangey. You’ve made orange!”
(Notice the green racing car at the bottom of the first pic? That’s her Ben 10. Anyone know what his real name is?)
Until now, she’d been happy to keep rolling the vehicles from side to side over mostly the same spot. But once she’d connected a few of the train carriages together, she started to explore making curves.
At this point, she stopped paying too much attention to the paint and the patterns, and instead started to imaginary play. She assigned characters and voices to the different vehicles and played happily by herself for about half an hour. I love hearing the conversations she has with her toys during this sort of play, it is a real insight into how she perceives the world at large.
At the end of the play session, we had some really beautiful art. Lots of swirly patterns where she’d driven the trains round in circles, and lots of really awesome textures at the spot where she’d rolled the various vehicles over and over again.
JJ volunteered (!) to help with the clean up afterwards, which actually was lots of fun and an extension of the play. A simple bucket of water and a tea towel did most of the job, and I found a fine paint brush was handy to clean out the tiny axles.
What different materials have you been painting with lately?
Toddler friendly process art idea – using sticks to paint with (and on).
You might remember that I posted about a month ago about Dot Paintings, where I tried to introduce dot painting using sticks to JJ (then 3 years and 3 months old), with mixed success. Well, true to my promise, I brought out the sticks a week or so later…
This time I collected a variety of sticks from our backyard. I purposely chose thick and thin ones, straight ones and bumpy ones.
I laid out the paints, sticks and paper beforehand, so they were ready for JJ to discover when she wandered out to the backyard.
She was instantly intrigued…
I sat down next to her, and we painted together. I drew some hearts, and some dotty circles. JJ drew some dots too, and she tried to draw some lines, but she clearly was getting frustrated. There wasn’t enough paint on the end of the stick for her to draw a continuous line. She kept having to redip her stick into the paint.
And then she asked if I could get out some paint brushes for her. She said, in her explaining voice “Mummy, you like to paint with sticks. I like to paint with brushes. That’s ok, we can all paint with different things.”
It’s exactly the sort of thing that I say to her as we go about our day. She even said it in my tone…. It’s quite disconcerting having your own argument style used against you!
So, of course, I got out some paint brushes. After all, I want to encourage creativity, not stifle it. She evidently had an idea of how she wanted to paint.
And after only one or two swirls on the paper, do you know what she did next? She started to paint on the sticks themselves.
So I donated the sticks I’d been painting with to her cause, and sat back and watched my little toddler create in her own way. After all, both painting with sticks and painting on sticks are good practice for her fine motor and pre-writing skills. And more importantly, both are a chance to feed her creativity.
As this was a process oriented art session, the end product wasn’t that important. But here’s what it looked like anyway.
Once the painted sticks were dry, we stuck them in our flower bed, adding a bit of colour to our garden. They make me smile every time I water the flowers. 🙂
But JJ’s at an age (3 years and 3 months) where she is at the end of toddlerhood, and verging on preschooler-dom. She’s at a point where I want to introduce new artistic techniques and mediums.
Originally I had a grand idea in mind: JJ would make aboriginal-inspired art using sticks from our backyard to create a traditional dot painting. And it would be awesome.
You see, this is where I went wrong – I had too much of a plan.
When JJ saw me get out the paints, she started to gather the paint brushes. “No JJ, we’re not going to use paint brushes today. We’re going to paint with sticks, like this. Can you make dots like I am?”
But she wasn’t interested. She wanted to paint with paint brushes. She wanted to paint lines and blobs. She didn’t care that Mummy has this brilliant blog post idea.
So we put the sticks away and painted an ordinary painting with paint brushes as we usually do.
I left it a few days, and then gave it another shot. This time I didn’t instruct. I didn’t even ask JJ if she wanted to paint. I just sat down and started to paint myself. And instead of introducing sticks as a new medium, I just turned the brush over and used the other end to make dots and fine lines.
Before long JJ came over to see what I was doing. She said “You’re not allowed to paint with that end of the brush Mummy”. I explained it’s OK to paint with all sorts of things. Look, I can make little lines and dots!
Then she asked if she could paint too. And she started to paint using the bristle end of the brush. And then she flipped the brush over, and started to dot…
