Sylvie's Art Wall: Fall

Sylvie has been very busy updating her Art Wall for fall. Like most Southern Californian moms, I don't let the fact that it's the 70s and every tree on our street is green stop me from teaching my child about the changing colors of fall.

A couple of our favorite fall projects:

Fall Tree - I bought a pack of orange/red/yellow tissue paper at Lakeshore which we used to make this tree. We are also planning to use our tissue paper to make this hand-print turkey project, and probably some candle projects for Hanukkah. Little tissue paper squares have to be picked up with the pinchers, so they are great for working on fine motor skills.

Color-Mixing Leaves - I have been wanting to do this project for awhile, but looked for eyedroppers without success at Walgreens, CVS and Lakeshore. Then it finally occurred to me that we had a never-been-used eyedropper that came in the baby medical kit we got when Sylvie was a newborn. It's big and fat and perfect for toddler hands! We didn't have food coloring so I just diluted our tempera paint. Sylvie really liked this project because it was messy and the eyedropper was new and novel. The eyedropper is another great fine motor activity.

Sylvie also loves these dot art painters, which are perfect for toddler-sized hands.

Happy Fall Everybody!

Long Beach Museum of Art

Sylvie, Thomas and I checked out the Long Beach Museum of Art today and their Family Artmaking Workshops (all FREE on Fridays!). The Workshop is recommended for kids 5 and up so there was definitely a part of it that was a wee bit out of our league. [Specifically, transferring a photocopy of a painting using transfer paper, Modge Podge and a spoon. And in our defense, it was a bit out of Thomas' league and he studied art at CSULB.] So we just skipped that part and went forward with the collaging. Sylvie loved using the scissors and the glue, and Mommy always loves using other people's supplies and having people there that are paid to clean up the mess.

Crafty Friday: Part One

My birthday gift to Sylvie (and ok, fine, myself) was a new box full of big kid art supplies, which we broke open this morning. We have a ton of coffee filters left over from Sylvie's birthday party and they are actually the perfect canvas for Sylvie. Their size is ideal for the 2 year-old attention span.

Sylvie was super excited about the pom-poms and the glitter paint. Also, since she loves stickers but stickers can be kind of expensive given how many she likes to use, I picked up a pack of color coding circle lables in the office supply section. A pack of 560 for dirt cheap!

One of Sylvie's favorite phrases lately is "hard work!" [Used most often actually when she is putting together her train tracks.] Here she is doing some hard work with her new art supplies.

And Painting Just Before Bathtime?

That's extra fun.

Painting

Wednesday morning started out rough. I swept up half a bag of spilled raisins off the floor and tried to Resolve one cup of spilled milk out of a rug and pee out of a couch pillow. And that was before 8 am. It was time to get out the easel and have some fun painting. Cleaning up turned into water play in the kitchen,

which always ends with a foot soak. And who doesn't feel relaxed after a nice foot soak???