Season Craft [Guest Post from Blog Me Mom]

As many of you know, I invited some of my favorite mama bloggers to contribute to the Fall Fun Series to give myself a little break while recovering from my Bariatric surgery.  I’m happy to report that the surgery went much better than I expected and after 6 weeks (and 41 lbs. down!) I’m feeling better than ever.  This will be our last Fall Kids Craft, and I will start filling in with lots of creative ideas for the holidays.  So without further ado, here is creative mama, Suja, of Blog Me Mom…

Season Craft

 

With the season change and all, we were out making some simple fall and spring art to compare and contrast. Tailoring kids activities around their current interests and temperament is definitely the key to a successful fun and educational activity. Today’s project turned into a great family activity since all of us were involved in some way.

Like many families out there, we are partial to paint. We have had so much fun with painting in the past that we have tried painting with spaghetti brushes, created animal resist painting and recently painted numerous mini pumpkins.

In this  activity, we use paint to print with foam leaves and water bottles.

These are the things we used…

• Empty water bottles
• Foam leaves
• Washable kids paint
• Butcher paper
• Tape
• Markers

Next time I’d fill up the water bottles one fourths with water( and tape the bottle cap if needed) to ensure the bottle actually stands up right while working on the activity.

Fall Craft

I taped down the butcher paper on our table and invited the kids.

The artist in our family, daddy drew the tree trunk and painted inside a bit.

The kids got excited to paint over the same tree trunk simply because daddy is part of our art project. Daddy’s presence during one of our projects is pretty rare.

I set out some fall color paints for dipping. Next, the kids dipped the foam leaves in paint and printed on the tree trunk. I should say that it takes a couple of tries to get the paint evenly on the back of the foam leaves. While baby A was printing with the leaves, big sis and I called out the color names louder to see if she could pick the one we called. We reinforced color names with baby A. With Big A, it was the sheer fun of creating patterns and each time she printed she expected a perfect leaf print.

This activity gave us a chance to talk about seasons, especially fall and spring (for all of 5 whole minutes).

• Leaves change colors.
• What are the prominent fall colors?
• Why is it called fall season?
• New word – Autumn

Spring Craft

For a bright spring art project we printed with water bottles.

We dipped the base of an empty bottle in paint and printed on paper. She added the pollens even before the paint dried.

We used two empty water bottles and at least 5 different colors of paint. I also set out a water dish and a rag to clean the bottle bases before switching colors. You could easily finish printing one color before moving on to another. But here, my older one would print one purple flower, clean the bottle, print a yellow flower and would instantly come back to print a purple..So a rag is a must.

Once Big A was satisfied with the all the flower printing we wrapped it up by printing a Sun.

Later, Big A added details to the art. She added stems, leaves to the flowers. Using a brown marker she also added the dirt for the flower field.

We placed our paintings side by side and compared and contrasted the characteristics of the seasons.

I liked the question which followed the exercise. “Why do we always draw the Sun only in summer and spring pictures but never draw the sun in our fall art. But we have the Sun on all days.”

Questions like these make all the play based learning activities worth all the effort.

Suja is a mom of a preschool girl and a toddler girl. She blogs at Blog Me Mom where she shares her play based learning activities and arts and crafts activities she does with her kids.

 

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