"Starry Night" Paintings

Taking inspiration from Van Gough's 'Starry Night' Painting and from the Happy Hooligans we made our own wintery night paintings today.

We started with some card covered in tin-foil and the children painted this in a variety of blues with a hint of white and yellow. They loved the way they could see the brush strokes much more clearly on the foil than paper. After dashing out to our toddler group for the morning while the pictures dried, the children placed grated up pieces of old crayons onto their paintings. 

We talked about how we were going to make the crayon melt and then placed them in the oven for a couple of minutes. The children were fascinated with the effect of melting the crayons and loved watching them dry. We all thought the end result looked quite effective. 

Ice Marbles

 As we had the first sun of the week today I tried out a new outdoor play activity - ice marbles!

I filled some balloons with water and a variety of food colouring and put them in the freezer overnight before revealing them to the boys who thought they were fantastic. This would probably have looked more impressive in the snow but it does not look like we will get any of that here. 

The boys had great fun exploring the texture of the ice - they were shocked at how cold it felt! They happily counted the marbles and then decided it would be fun to try and stand on them - this was pretty unsuccessful! 

After a lovely game of football they then set about trying to break pieces off of the balls before placing them in the flower beds to melt. 

Cotton Wool Snowman

One of my mindees is absolutely fascinated by snowmen so, as we do not appear to be getting anything close to snow in this area of Plymouth, we decided to make our own snowmen pictures from cotton wool. 

I gave the younger children a snowman shape, some glue, cotton wool and hats, buttons and noses cut from card and then let them loose. They talked about where they would put the hats, eyes and noses and the stuck them on. 

The boys were not remotely impressed with the texture of the cotton wool and the way it stuck to their sticky fingers! They did manage to stick some on their snowmen eventually and finished off their pictures with some snow coloured fingerprints. 

My daughter decided to show off her creative side and designed her own snow lady!

Snow Play Dough

As the majority of the country are expecting snow, today we made some snow play dough. 

After researching several ideas I replaced flour with cornflour to get the snowy white colouring of fresh snow and then added some silver glitter for extra sparkle!

The children made use if plastic animals to look at footprints in the snow. They developed their creative play through imitating the animals chasing each other and eating the snow. 

The children then turned their attention to making snowballs (but not throwing them!). After counting them out they proceeded to make snowmen and requested all sorts of accessories for them! 

Winter Tree Paintings

In keeping with our wintry theme we have been making some wintry tree paintings making use of that great technique - tape resist art. We think they turned out rather nicely. 

 First we went for a walk through the woods looking at the wintry trees. While JS was asleep I stuck some masking tape on the paper in the shape of a tree. I then handed him the paper with some 'wintry' watercolour paints and the colour began! 

This was such a great activity for a two year old mindee as he gets to paint as much as he likes as well as painting a picture that he subsequently recognises. He is very proud of this one and shows it to me on the wall each time we pass!