Showing posts with label Summer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Summer. Show all posts

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Rice/Salt "Sand" Art

Someone asked what craft activities could be done with baby food jars. This is a great one for the summer, a beach theme, ocean theme or rainbow theme.


Here's a sneak peak inside my baby food jar bin. We are STOCKED! This heavy bin is holding a gate up on one side, so I couldn't get it any wider. I have a few hundred in there, generously donated by my friend Kimber.


Sand is not friendly to my vacuum or plumbing, so we try to do that OUTSIDE. Plus, the pretty, very fine, CLEAN and sanitized white sand that holds color well that I would like for these types of projects, is VERY expensive at the pet store/aquarium shop. So instead, we use rice or salt.
I had a variety of rice and salt already colored, so I decided to use up what we all ready had available.


The salt is very uniform in size. To make it look more like sand, you can add Kosher or other larger grain salt to the finer stuff  for a greater variety to the texture.


The rice I place into my coffee/spice grinder...




Give it a whirl with a few shakes...and it comes out multi-textured and multi-shaded in color.



I set out the colored rice and salt in small containers.




They were given the sticker box to decorate their baby food jars on the outside.




Then they filled their jars using baby formula scoops, which are the perfect size. For this and a lot of things.





They LOVED this activity and were VERY proud of the results.


Since they are glass, I asked the parents to be observant of how they were handled by the children. I also did not have time to seal the lids on with hot glue or super glue, so that was left to the parents as well.

I went to Miss B's 5 yo birthday party last weekend and mom had them sitting in the kitchen window, a pretty rainbow against the sky.



Since this was a spur of the moment craft,
to have pics to show someone, I went back and spray painted the lids with a spray paint for metal. The red I had was clogged, so they got black and hammered silver. Normal paint will not stick to these slick lids, it needs to be for metal.
Tags: rice, salt, sand, art, craft, layered, layers, preschool, pre-k, child, care, daycare, child, children's, rainbow, beach, ocean, theme, unit, summer, fine motor, color, colors,

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Seahorse Paper Plate Craft w/template



I couldn't find a good seahorse template for this craft, so I made one. It works on a normal size paper plate. I printed it out on cardstock for them to trace around.  Be warned, it isn't easy getting it to form to the contours of the plate, so this is one you'll have to help even older preschools with holding to trace.

The line is also fairly difficult to cut, so we used teacher-assist scissors.



The children chose the color of paint and painted both sides on consecutive days. On the afternoon of the second day, we embellished. It was one of the children's ideas to do the glitter on the tails. I offered sequins for the body, but they wanted to do finger painting instead.




Really, the opportunities for embellishment are endless and completely open to whatever resources you have on hand and the artistic direction of your students/child. 





These looked really cute hanging up.

SKILLS

Art: artistic expression, painting, cut, paste, multi media, 3D art
Science: discussion of why the seahorse tail is curled
Fine Motor: trace, cutting curves, paste, paint, placing embellishments
Tags: ocean, sea, theme, unit, preschool, daycare, child, care, art, craft, seahorse, paper, plate, trace, cut, glue, paste, paint, sequins, glitter, finger, template, printable, free, kid, kids