Thursday 21 May 2015

Snail Craft


The children are particularly fascinated with mini beasts at the moment and we have been using the big magnifying glasses to conduct mini beast hunts in our wildlife garden. Snails are pretty rare in our garden due to our resident hedgehog but we have made some lovely snail pictures to brighten up our walls!

The children enjoyed using acrylic paints to decorate paper plates that would become the snail shells. Even our 12 month old joined in this bit using her hands to spread the paint around and then attempting to hold the brush for the first time. 


After our shells had dried the children decorated their snails, using glue spreaders to enhance their fine motor skills as well as picking up the small sequins. Finally when the snails were dry the children practised their use of scissors by cutting the top of the green paper to form lines that represented the grass. We are pleased with our colourful display!

Thursday 14 May 2015

Kitchen Utensil Art


I love finding new ideas for art activities for the children and a fellow childminder suggested raiding the kitchen utensils to create some patterns in the children's art work.


The children thought this was a fantastic idea. They talked amongst themselves about the different cutlery available and discussed the shapes of the various spatulas and moulds that we used. 


With using different objects to paint the children focus more on their art work - where they are placing the patterns and why they are doing this which resulted in some fabulous discussions amongst the group and generated a great variety of colourful artwork!

Wednesday 6 May 2015

Ocean Sensory Dough


We frequently visit the local aquarium and as such I know how fascinated all the children are by the fish and other sea creatures. This provided a perfect theme for our latest sensory play. I created play dough in different shades of light and dark blue and in a green/blue colour. We talked about how they were all different colours of blue, discussing light and dark. 


To the tray we added some plastic sea creatures in addition to some shells, glass pebbles and a small number of tools to move the dough around. The children were fascinated with the shiny glass stones and chose to make different shapes sticking them and the shells into the dough, one even saying he had made a snowman. 


Throughout the play the children practised their counting skills, counting out and comparing the number of stones in their sculptures. We also discussed the sounds that we could hear at the beginning of the animal words such as sss for seal and t for turtle.