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.

SUMMER SESSION

We already had two meetings of the summer session group! Last week, we made our own saltdough, worked with it and shaped it, and added nature items like little stones, pine cones and flowers. Then, we painted with tempera paints and made colorful paintings with regular brushes and sponges. Today, we made a sculpture out of wood blocks and wooden sticks with glue and then painted them, and finally made hats: collage with pompons and feathers and butterfly stickers on paper plates! 

MIRO'

Today, I brought a book about Miro', a Spanish surrealist artist, who painted wonderfully colored paintings with many images that also children can enjoy. We discovered that he used some symbols over and over, like the moon, stars and eyes.



We first started with a Miro' inspired collage, gluing strips of colored paper and round cut magazine shapes onto white paper and adding tissue paper, as well.

Then, we used black markers to draw swirly shapes onto paper. The spaces that were created by the markers we colored with watercolor, creating  colorful shapes like Miro' did.