Let The Art Projects Begin

Okay, so we are really not artists.  Neither of my boys have a lot of patience for it, whether it's coloring with crayons, painting with brushes or fingers (or whatever), or dealing with glue and tiny pieces of paper.  So, it's my goal to come up with projects that they will be willing to do for more than 5 minutes, and hopefully feign some sort of excitement at the prospect of creating something new.

So far, the projects that I have set up for them to do seem to be going well, but I get a lot of complaints from my oldest when a little bit of glue or paint gets on his fingers.  Meanwhile, the younger one insists on making his entire arm a work of art with the purple paint (since that is his favorite color).  So, it's a work in progress!

Below are some photos (and some with descriptions) of the projects we've done so far. 

The apple mosaic to go with our first week of school.  This was Hayden's.  It didn't turn out too bad.  I cut strips of red and green construction paper, and he got to cut small squares for himself.  This gave him the opportunity to work on his scissor skills.  Sawyer did the same, only keep in mind that at 2 1/2 years old, his scissors skills have a long way to go, and he had enough patience to cover about 1/4 of his apple.  Still, it's hanging on the wall, and he's happy with it.

Binoculars for our 5 senses week.  Obviously, we were talking about sight this day.  This, they enjoyed because all their decorations were stickers.  They had several to choose from, and since Hayden loves superheroes and dinosaurs, that's what he decided to put all over his.  And, of course, his favorite color is pink.  So, we had to have pink binoculars!  Once these were dried and ready, the boys loved using them to "find" objects around the house.  I think because of this project, they think that they can play with every art project they make

Salty the Fish Craft from DLTK's Craft website (noted in Week 3's post).  I printed out the fish and we used kosher salt colored with koolaid to decorate.  Because Hayden was so freaked out about the thought of using his finger to spread glue around his fish, his got a little patchy (see left photo).  BUT!  It turned out pretty well for a kid who's not into art.  Sawyer had no problems putting glue ALL over his fish (see right photo).  I had to help him tone it down a bit.  We could have gone into a lot more detail, using aluminum foil balls to make bubbles, talk about fish living in the water, how they breathe, etc.  But this project was best left finished where we stopped.  We were dangerously approaching their time limit as far as glue and colors were concerned.

This was the best project so far.  Cat in the Hat lifesaver hats.  I bought a bag of the lifesaver candies and let them pick three colors to make a pattern with.  Disclaimer:  I had to also let them suck on one or two throughout the course of making this project in order to keep them from eating their patterns.  Making the hats turned out to be a pretty sticky project, and when we added the glue to hold it all together, it actually slipped around a lot.  So, this one required a lot of Mommy's hands-on help.  For the base of the hat, I used milk jug caps and painted them (well, really, I only had to paint the purple one because the other one was already green). 

These stayed on their desks for the week, and then I threw them out because I was afraid of attracting bugs if they stayed around much longer, but I imagine you can probably spray them with shellac or modpodge or whatever that stuff is that covers food items and gives them that nice shiny look and makes them last forever.

And so ends the beginning of art projects in the Holbrook household for this year.  The next round of art projects ought to be pretty entertaining.  I'm already learning a lot from what we've done so far.  Trial and error, right?