Hammered Flower Art

With so many beautiful colours in our nature garden at the moment I was determined to incorporate the vibrancy in some of the children's art work. We started by looking at the flowers we could see, discussing the sizes and colours and put a collection of some of the flowers together.

With it being a sunny day we decided some outdoor art work would be good and we then went to one of our tree stumps with some paper. Each child took it in turns to arrange some flowers on the tree stump. They took great care in their arrangements, talking about what colours they wanted where.

Younger children then used a wooden mallet and the older children used the hammer. Practising their skills at using tools they hammered away at the paper that we had placed over the top of their flower arrangements. This led to some beautiful colours being transferred to the paper.

Our only slight disaster was that one child had loved the colours of the berries so we agreed to place one in the picture. This did, possibly predictably, make the paper go rather soggy!

Bonfire Night 2016

With safety being an important factor of educating children about bonfire night, older children engaged in a powerpoint quiz that tested their knowledge about firework safety and prompted some discussions on how the children could stay safe if they were going to see fireworks. The children really enjoyed this and became very vocal as well as taking it in turns to move the mouse. 

This year we also decided to do some activities relating to bonfire night after the children had been out to see some fireworks enabling us to use the knowledge they had gained to prompt use of language to describe fireworks as well as engaging their artistic talents to enable them to design their own fireworks. 

For younger children I used this opportunity to enhance their sensory skills and their motor skills. They used cardboard tubes to move paint around paper, creating explosion patterns. Some of the children chose to explore the paint with their fingers while others looked at the resulting colours and also enjoyed shaking glitter shakers over the wet paint. 

Flower Sun Catchers

We have been out and about lots in this lovely summer weather and the children always admire the colours of the flowers that they see. We combined their love of nature and the outdoors with some craft by collecting some of the petals that the wind had blown from the plants.

The children sorted the petals into colours and, using contact paper on a cardboard ring frame, they began to arrange the petals into their own arrangements. The older children worked on some elaborate arrangements while our youngest picked up handfuls and threw them to the paper!

We talked about numbers, colours and shapes of the petals before covering the petals with another set of contact paper to stick them in place. Our youngest thought pressing (and punching) this down was great! We placed our sun catchers in the window and talked about how bright the colours were when they caught the sun. These made such beautiful decorations and were perfect for children of a wide range of ages.

Halloween 2015

The children get so excited about Halloween so this year I thought of a few activities that hey could engage in. Play dough is always a great hit so we first made some monsters from the play dough. The children used their fine motor skills to design and create their monsters and enjoyed telling the other children about their monster!

Sensory trays are fabulous learning resources with children of all ages and one child has been asking me for waterbeds for a long time so this was a great opportunity. We used the black beads with some cups and cutlery that enabled imaginative conversations from the older children and use of fine motor skills from our one year old who enjoyed moving the beads from pot to pot and feeling them with her hands. 

The older children enjoyed some artistic drawing, both designing the face on their pumpkins and creating a halloween themed silhouettes on coffee filters that they then painted with watercolour paints to give a sunset background. The younger children made their silhouettes from using coloured tissue paper and the combination of these gave us a great halloween display!