Candy Cane Inspired Painting

Our children love to paint with marbles. We put out red and white paint today and encouraged them to create candy cane inspired art! It was so much fun and great hand-eye coordination practice as the children had to work hard to keep the marbles in the tray when rolling them around.

Gingerbread Scented Play Dough

We made some scented gingerbread play dough with the children today. It smelled so good and was so appealing! All we did was add allspice, cinnamon, and cloves to our regular recipe!  Mmmmmm!

Stamping Holiday Wrapping Paper

One of our favourite activities to do for the holiday season is to encourage the children to do some stamping with seasonal cookie cutters and paint. The piece of artwork can then be sent home and recycled as wrapping paper.  It's a great lesson on art, sharing, and recycling!

The cookie cutters and festive paint appealed to the children and many were eager to participate in the activity as soon as they saw it!

Children were invited to stamp their papers however they wanted. We love the jolly red snowman!

Every child made a sheet of printed paper. Why don't you invite your child to choose whose present gets wrapped in this special paper and encourage him or her to help you wrap? It would be great fine motor and hand-eye practice!

Cloud Dough

We've been reading about cloud dough on the internet with great interest and decided to make some with our children. After reviewing the recipe, the children helped us measure and mix the ingredients - 8 parts white flour to 1 1/2 parts baby oil (you can add more oil if you want a stickier consistency).

The cloud dough was so interesting because it was silky and stuck together, but crumbled easily. It was so much fun to play with!

Feeding Wildlife

We had a large bin of corn donated to our classroom that we decided to place outdoors for the animals in the forested area of our school yard. We discussed with the children what types of animals might enjoy this food source, and where they thought a good place to leave it would be. Because it was such a beautiful day outside, we spent time looking around the yard and discussing with our friends what we thought. 

Many children decided to bury the corn a little in the leaf piles or hide it in the grooves of our large trees.

We asked the children to remember where they hid their corn. In a week we're going to head outside again and see if it's still there, or if it's been eaten!  I wonder what we'll find!

Tape Painting

Mrs. Bombardier put out a wonderfully layered painting activity for the children to explore. Children were invited to first cover a piece of painting paper with painter's tape (so it could be easily removed from the paper without ripping it). 

Once the children were happy with their tape designs, they painted on top of the paint using a variety of colours.

When finished painting, the children carefully lifted the tape from their painting, revealing an amazing design below!

Some children chose to repeat the process and put more tape on top of the painting, paint again, and remove the tape to reveal more designs. Others were happy with their original finished product.

The artwork lead to much rich discussion about the process of the art making and describing what the pieces reminded them of. The children had some interesting ideas. What do you see when you appreciate the art work?

One of our favourite blogs had a great post about how to talk to young children about art work that you might find interesting!

Roller Painting and Print Making

We wanted to engage children in a communal art experience that encouraged sharing and problem solving. After sprinkling the primary colours on the art table, we invited the children to explore painting using rollers.

Paint rollers are such a fun tool to use and the children were amazed at the new shades of colour that were created on the table. Painting on the table provided children the freedom of space and movement as their actions were not confined by the size of a paper.

Once the children had created colours that they liked, we encouraged them to press a paper on top to create a print of their work.

When they lifted the paper, it was like magic! The plastic cover on the table helped the paint to swirl and bubble and the textures and colours that weren't evident on the black plastic looked stunning in the prints!