One Inch World

This was fun, but would have worked better outside, because the ice cubes would have melted faster. Instead we hurried them along by getting out a bowl of water to dip them in. I tried two different kinds of paint popsicles, frozen (washable) tempera paint, and water with food coloring. MaryAnn Kohl’s First Art suggests liquid water colors, but we don’t have any. (Shocking, we seem to have everything else between Rebecca’s art supplies and mine…) The water and food coloring definitely worked better than the tempera paint, the tempera paint was squashy and crunchy and globy, and didn’t really like being frozen I think. The water and food coloring melted onto the paper much more gracefully. I saw the water and food coloring suggestion most recently from Chasing Cheerios Painting with Ice Cubes post, I think that was our inspiration anyhow. Which I’m needing more and more of! There will probably be somewhere between 0-3 art playgroups before we have a new baby, and then we’ll just be having playgroups for a while. I already can’t remember what I did this morning, and my writing is deteriorating! And then comes parent participation preschool at the end of September. Things are going to be changing around here.

I saw this great idea for active painting at The Snail’s Trail, yo-yo painting, and I knew we had to try it with our group. I thought it was a lot of fun!

The idea is to make a ball of beans at the end of a nylon leg, get paint on it, and smack it into the paper. When you first start out the beans are clean, but as you go along they start to pick up all the different colors and your splats start becoming more speckled rather than single colored.

The ‘yo-yo’ is pretty impossible to control, but I thought it was lots of fun. This activity might have been more popular with the moms than the kids. The kids enjoyed it, but they were done with it after an average of 1.5 paintings.