Straw Blowing Art

When I was teaching there were a few art projects that were my go to projects. I knew that almost every child would be ready to participate. They were easy to set up and take down and just plain fun One of these projects was Straw Blowing Art. It is very simple all Materials Needed: Paint (watered down) paint cups spoons (or eye droppers) straws (one for each child) paper Have the children apply a small amount of paint like little dribbles on the paper They then take their straw and blow on the paint until it moves in the direction they want I used powdered tempera paint and added water. I made it a bit to watery I think. I prefer it a bit less runny. My kids loved this like I knew they would. It is always a crowd pleaser! And how simple we pretty much always have the materials on hand

Colored Sand

We have a bunch of colored water in spray bottles left over from Mikey's Messy Party. During the party we used these spray bottles for spray art on a fabric sheet But I was thinking we have to be able to use them for something else. So I thought of our sand table The kids first just sprayed the sand to create splashes of color and then they started thinking of other things they could do. Kaia asked for a sand mold. So I gave her a cookie cutter she scooped sand inside and then poured the red water on top. It worked (although) I should have made the red a bit darker at the top left you can see the plain sand so you can see that there is a slight difference She also used the water to make tunnels in the sand My favorite thoguh was her idea to place the cookie cutter down in the sand and to try and spray only inside3 the cookie cutter It worked GREAT! Mikey decided that the blue sand looked like ice cream so he asked for the ice cream scooper And made some delicious ice cream cups!

Colored Ice

It has been EXTREMELY hot here the last few days. So we decided to make some colored ice for the water table. Unfortunately I am all out of balloons. And lets face it ice cubes melt so fast especially when it is this hot so instead we made... Ice in our muffin tins! It worked out great and I will definitely be using our muffin tins for ice play from now on. I love it because it makes ice that is larger than an ice cube. The trays are reusable, and if you stack them right they are stackable in your freezer. I set different kinds of eye droppers in the sensory table as well I love these colorful little ice blocks it took them a bit longer to melt than an ice cube, but it is extremely hot so they did melt pretty fast I let the kids use salt to to help the ice melt away Kaia used a melon-baller to apply salt to her ice blocks This kept the kids busy and cool for a while. The ice blocks were easy to make Materials Needed: muffin/ cupcake tin food coloring or liquid watercolors water I put just a few drops of food coloring in each tin and then added water and stuck them in my freezer. It was that easy!

Playdough Cupcake and Cookie Making

The kids have been asking to have a playdough bakery for a while now. So today I finally made one for them I made strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate playdough