I Ain't Gonna Paint No More!

Have you ever read this book?

 

It is so cute. You should probably go check it out at the library right now. It is a favorite at our house. It's about a little boy who, after promising never to paint again, goes on to paint himself from head to toe. To make it even more fun you can sing the words in the book to the tune of 'It ain't gonna rain no more'. 

It was the feature book at a special story-time we have in our library where each child gets to take home a copy of the book. My kids often request to hear this book and today when they pulled it out of the bookshelf, I had an idea.

I took a picture of each of them standing in front of a white wall. I printed the picture out in black and white.

 

I taped the picture to the kids' easel, and let them paint themselves from head to toe. 

 

Sweet Apples

It was Apple Week at our hour this last week. We did a lot of fun different apple activities. Here are a few of them.

My favorite thing we did all week was an apple tree collage. I cut out the apples and the leaves and my daughter cut up the bark. It was great cutting practice and very relaxing for both of us.

I took a piece of poster board with an outline of a tree and taped it to the window. My plan was to cover in with contact paper, but I was fresh out, so I just used a whole bunch of strips of packing tape layered up against each other. It made the perfect sticky surface and was only slightly more work than contact paper.  

My son was very excited about the apples (I used all sorts of paper, glitter paper, holographic paper, and other craft paper), but that's about where his interest ended. My daughter continued on sticking on leaves and bark, but lost interest when she got to this point:

I thought it looked pretty the way it was, but I decided to leave out the materials for several more days. I'm glad I did because after a week, this is what it looked like. I did end up helping with the trunk because my daughter asked me to, but the rest was mostly her doing, with a little help from her brother. She made me laugh because she was bothered by the apples and bark my son put on the side of the tree. She ripped them off and put them in a more 'appropriate' place.

 

For an outing we took a trip to the grocery store to pick out several different kinds of apples. My daughter washed them.

My son sorted them.

We all tasted them (and appreciated the stars in the middle). Unfortunately the one we liked the best had already lost its sticker, so I'm not sure what kind it was, but it was delicious!

Painting an apple tree was much more appealing to my son than the collage. That boy sure loves to paint!

 

I also found a bunch of apple printables on Pinterest. There are all sorts of wonderful packets if you search long enough. 

Paint Date

I feel pretty lucky that I have a garage. For the last 5 1/2 years of my life I have resided in a two bedroom apartment/house/townhouse/apartment/townhouse, in that order. For some reason we just can't shake the two bedroom thing. I really can't complain too much because 1. I only have two kids. My sister has three kids in a two bedroom, so I do realize we could be much more cramped than we currently are. 2. We have a two car garage and only one garage door opener, which means my husband parks in the driveway and I use the other half of the garage for arts and crafts and toys. The other day we had a paint and playdough play date in our garage. It was so much fun. The kids painted and painted and painted. I opted for a group mural as opposed to individual painting, and I was really pleased with the outcome.

If you notice, I wrote "Please keep paint over here!" on the top of the paper, and then later remembered that everyone involved in the painted was under 5. Oh well. At least the moms knew where to keep the paint.

Toilet Paper Stamps

If you take a toilet paper roll, you can squish it just perfectly into the shape of a heart. Once you've done that, it makes the perfect stamp. Happy Valentine's Day!

Bloody Snowman

We made a cotton-ball snowman. The only problem was that he only glue I could find was kind of and orangey red left over from some other project. The poor guy looks like he was in a snowball battle and came out the loser. Actually, a 'snowball' battle is exactly what happened after this little project.

Window Paints

We put some tempera paint in a zip-lock bag and taped it to the window. Both kids loved it. It was a great way to practice writing letters, mixing colors, and just feeling squishy stuff without getting messy.

Let's Go Riding in an Automobile

We've been talking a lot about cars lately. Our favorite car book is Little Blue Truck by Alice Schertle.

Yesterday, using the help of some internet clip art (some wheels, a steering wheel, and a license plate) and some string for a seat belt, we made our own car. My daughter was so pleased. She kept saying, "Look! I driving!!" If you look behind her, you'll see that my son was less than impressed.
Today I taped a piece of paper over our old license plate and gave my daughter some crayons. She didn't know what was underneath, but kept coloring. She kept saying, "ooohhhhh, so bumpy!" She was so excited when she started to see the letters come through. She was especially excited when she saw a K because that's the first letter in her name.

When she was all done, we took off the paper and she saw the license plate underneath. She got such a kick out of carry it around, and later taping it to the back of the car we made yesterday.

Color Wonder

Have you ever tried color wonder? Markers and paints that ONLY work on specific paper. They're expensive, but I think they're great. I have no fear leaving my toddler alone with markers. Instead of buying the coloring books, I get the plain paper and then print pictures directly on the paper. I also like the cut the paper in half so that we get more bang for our buck.

Mess-free Painting

*Please excuse the flipped up skirt.

My daughter loves to paint. I love it when projects are easy to clean up. This activity caters to both of us. I give my daughter a cup full of water and a couple of paint brushes and she paints to her hearts content on the chalk board. A few minutes later, the board is dry and she can start all over again.

Her favorite thing to paint right now is our family. She paint four different figures (There's Mommy! There's Daddy!) and then gets a kick as they start to disappear (Mommy gone! Daddy gone!).

We Glue! Do you?

When I saw this project on Pinterest and knew that I had to try it. It's really simple. All you need is a glue bottle, food coloring, a willing kid, and a piece of paper.

Open up the glue bottle, put it a couple of drops of your color of choice, close the lid, shake, shake, shake, and hand it over to the child (with some instructions about keeping it on the paper, of course).

This is what it looks like wet. Once it's dry, it makes a really pretty dark glossy color.

Toddler Collage

My little one has been very interested in glue lately. That is what inspired these projects.

First, here she is making her own little impressionist collage. She had a great time gluing lots of different little squares on top of each other.


Second, we read The Gingerbread Man several times this week before realized we could make our own gingerbread men. These two little guys have been run, run, running as fast as they can all over our house.

Grandma's Flowers

When I saw this on the Artful Parent, I knew I wanted to make something similar. When we went to visit Grandma (who lives in another state), we collected a whole bunch of flowers from her garden. We stuck them in a big thick book and then waited. Last week we put them between some sheets of contact paper. As you can probably tell, I did most of the arranging. My little girl seemed more interested in handing me the flowers, but she did contribute a few flowers to our project. Now she likes to run over to the door and say, "Grandma's flowers."

Large Scale Art

I bought some poster board at Target the other night and then forgot about it in the car. I finally remembered, and when I pulled it out my daughter's eyes lit up. I pulled out the box of crayons and she got right to work. It was really interesting to watch her color. She started walking around the paper and drawing at the same time.
She then decided she would get better use of the paper lying down. When it was all finished, she was very proud of her work.

Tubes, Tubes, Tubes

For some reason, I'm not sure why, I started collecting toilet paper and paper towel rolls a couple of months ago. Yesterday I got out the box full of tubes. We colored them with crayons, stacked them, fit skinny tubes inside fat tubes, dropped crayons down the middle, and played them like trumpets. I'm glad I held on to them for so long.

Toddler Art

This was a fun and easy art project. First my daughter used marker to color the paper. I then gave her water and a paint brush and she was able to smear the colors around. I had read about 'clean painting' before and it was as fun as I imagined.

Personalized Valentines

This week we made Valentines. My daughter started off with artistic design:

Then we cut out her drawings into hearts. We also cut hearts out of scrapbook paper to be the background. Finally, I sewed the two together. I'm sure I could have glued them, but I liked the way the stitching looked.

We liked them so much we made lots and lots of them!