SUMMER PROJECT: MAGNET STICKS

It's summer vacation soon and here, many hours of the August days are spent indoors in the aircondition! So here are a few art projects you can do at home. The first one are magnet sticks, which we have done at our classes and also at home. Here's what you need:
-craft sticks (יש אותם בחנויות כפר שעשועים או בחנויות יצירה)
-strong contact glue or glue gun
-brushes and paint (tempera or גואש)
-collage material and children's glue.

For the collage material you can get things like foam shapes or dots, anything works.

If you decide to paint, put a paper plate or newspaper underneath the sticks.

We also used fabric left overs (given to us from design shop Kuku)

Let the sticks dry and then stick to the fridge. The kids will enjoy playing with them!

FINGERPAINTING AND COLORED PLAYDOUGH

The little Sweetpeaz started today with fingerpainting on waxpaper. We used our fingers and hands to paint, but also a variety of tools to chose from: sponges, brushes, cars and rollers.

For the second part of the session I prepared colored playdough and we had fun preparing "pizzas" and "pitot" and "cakes".





COLLAGE AND CANVAS PAINTING

In the third meeting of our summer session we started off with collage. The theme was flower field and I brought many foam stickers in form of flowers, butterflies and also pretty fabric leftovers from Design Shop Kuku. We used lots of glue and also colored glue in bottles for the children to squeeze out by themselves, and of course lots of glitter.

We then painted on canvas, which has a great texture and the paint has different effects on it than it does on paper. The children used brushes, rollers, cars and their hands to create fantastic paintings!

SCULPTING WITH TODDLERS!

We started off this week with woodblock sculpting. This involves pieces of wood, leftovers from woodshops and frameshops, and old pieces of wooden toys. And a lot of glue! To this agegroup I give glue in small gluebottles (I add some paint to it to make it colorful), and small dishes with brushes, but usually they just dip the pieces into the dish of glue, which is a great way to work.

We then continued with dough sculpting, we mix the flour, salt and water all together, as the children like to be involved in the mixing stage. After working the dough with their bare hands and some tools, we gave them birthday candles to decorate and the kids paraded around with their "cakes" and sang birthday songs!





MAGNET STICKS

For this week's session I brought in craft sicks with a piece of magnet glued so the children could paint them and stick them to their fridge at home. First, we painted them, each child did about three sticks, then they added foam shapes to them and little dots and glitter. Then, we started a necklace project: the first step was to make beads from saltdough. then we are going to paint them and then make the necklaces. An all selfmade accessory!

SUMMER SESSION II: PROCESS ART

Our summer session group met again this week and the session turned out to be the best example of what process art is and why children are the most creative in this form of working!
Through the process of creating, the kids are free to experiment and discover their world and their capabilities. After a few times that young children are exposed to art materials and techniques, learning problem solving and mostly feeling joy making a mess, they discover how they can manipulate these art materials and they acquire many new skills. It is important for the children to focus on the process, because trying to make something as a finished product can be very frustrating and doesn't allow the child's own discovery and creativity. Instead, it opens up an opportunity for another level of communication: of expressing visually, but also verbally, what they feel and how they can express themselves. Slowly, their art projects start to take shape, as they already know how to use art materials in order to achieve a certain art work.

This week involved working with dough and the children asked to mix it with paint. They added glitter, little sticks and more and more red paint! At another table there were sandboxes to work with -- much sand ended up in the dough. And finally, we tried out tissue spray painting and watercolor.