preschool

Rolled Easter Egg Painting

When my daughter was about 2 1/2, her very favorite art activity was rolling paint-coated marbles all over sheets of paper. We made Rolling Rock Paintings with smooth rocks and Spooky Marble Spider Webs for Halloween. With Easter coming up, I was inspired to make something fun with the plastic eggs that consume dollar stores across [...]

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Growing Big Ideas

“Ideas aren’t self-contained things; they’re more like ecologies and networks. They travel in clusters.” -Kevin Kelly, Futurist and Author of What Technology Wants We had a big pile of CD cases, just waiting to be repurposed into…something! BioColors paints are known for their plasticity (they don’t crack like tempera), and I thought it we could [...]

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Gumdrop Sculptures

The provocation: A bowl of gumdrops and a handful of toothpicks. The first question: “Can I eat these?” Oh yeah, I guess they do kind of look like a snack. The second provocation (after we each ate a gumdrop, just to get that elephant out of the room): A square base of four gumdrops, attached [...]

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Rubber Band Painting

One of the almost-weekly segments of this site is called Creative Experiments, and last week’s experiment was to create something with Rubber Bands. Danielle and her daughter Simone were the first to participate with their Elastic Project, which you can view on Danielle’s blog. I love how they hung the piece from the ceiling. I’ve had [...]

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Making Chocolate Lollipops

Welcome Spring and Hellooooo Rain. This past weekend it poured. All weekend long. So we stayed in and made the best of it by inventing all sorts of rainy day activities like playing with our new chocolate lollipop molds. Recipe 1/3 cup chocolate chips 1 heaping tablespoon of butterscotch chips. (N isn’t super fond of [...]

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Funnel Painting

This was inspired by an idea we found in Mary Ann Kohl’s Preschool Art. I know I’ve said this many times before, but Mary Ann’s books are brimming with creative and engaging projects, and each of mine are dog-eared in a million places. We used materials that we already had around the house — low [...]

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Spring Sink Mat Prints

I spend a lot of time at the hardware store. And last week I spotted this flower mat — the Blumz Sink Mat! — I love that exclamation point! — It’s an exciting sink mat! — and it looked like something that could be fun to print with! In honor of Spring’s inevitable arrival (yes, [...]

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Recycled Sculpture

What you see here is one of the most successful art projects that’s hit our household thus far. And it was free! What was the allure? Working on a large scale A glue gun (the low-heat kind) Piles of imagination-building materials Collecting objects Autonomy with decision-making A novel project. It all began when we unearthed [...]

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Winter Gardening

Although it’s winter, we were hit by a glorious warm spell about a week ago and I was overwhelmed by the planting bug. Now that the rain is back, what’s especially timely about this activity is that it’s all about bringing the outdoors inside. So, for my snow-bound friends out there, this easy gardening project [...]

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