Christmas Art

Today's activity was all about celebrating creativity.  The children love crafting and naturally pull out crayons and paper and start drawing even outside of their home environment.  Today I wanted them to choose which supplies we would use to create a craft, without having the constraints of a particular project or theme in mind.  Wugs chose the paints and Dooey chose the colours pink and blue.  This was the first time Dooey was painting on an easel and it was very cute to see Wugs on the other side of that easel with some ink stampers thumping big yellow circles into his sheet of paper.  After Dooey had finished I swapped them around and gave Dooey a paper plate to use with the stampers.  (I find paper plates really handy with small children because they are small and tough, so easy to hold in place and the ridged piece at the edge of the plate can create a nice border if the art work is to be displayed).

Unfortunately Dooey puts everything in his mouth - the paint brush dripping with pink paint, the stampers and even the plate!  He hasn't been very well for over a week so he became easily agitated (I include this just so people know that although we do a lot of crafting, it isn't always easy - we have tantrums over paint brushes and mess all over the floor - all the things you can possibly dread when doing a craft with a little one).  Wugs continued with his painting and started working on a paper plate as well.

I hadn't planned to continue the craft for the rest of the day, but in the evening Wugs pulled up a chair and took down his paper plate and carried on.  (I was inspecting some glitter glue and a snowflake cutter I had purchased at the weekend which Wugs wanted to try out).  We decided to try out the snowflake cutter on their painting which was now dry and Wugs cut out loads of snowflakes.  (Later I used their cut-up painting to make some Christmas cards to send to family and friends).  Afterwards they tried out the glitter glue on their paper plates.  We decided that the paper plates looked like baubles and hung them in their playroom.

Just when I thought stage two of our crafting day was over, Wugs took down another paper plate, folded it in two and made a mouth with it.  He started stamping green circles on to it and took a wet wipe and smudged the green over the surface of the plate, chatting away while he was doing it.  (Wugs likes to imitate Mr Mister Maker from CBBCs).  I asked what he was making and he said "a crocodile" and then I looked closer at the plate and realised that the green circles were the scales and smudged green was his skin.  Unfortunately the glitter glue that Wugs applied to the plate to create eyes, mouth, nose and ears came out so fast that the different features intermingled into one big glittery blob.  Nevertheless, the process of watching Wugs experimenting with effects, colours and different mediums for crafting was fascinating!

What we used:

Paints

Paper

Do-A-Dot ink stampers

Paper plates

Glitter glue

Hobbycraft snowflake cutter

Kitchen foil

Card

Glue