art explorations

art activities: 16-22 October

I'm not done with this post, but I need to post it today for the First Unplugged Project. I'll finish it up tomorrow.


First Unplugged Project

Thanks to Mom Unplugged for suggesting this group project and to Jenny for spreading the word!

On Friday, Eliza and I went to the Quail Botanical Gardens to enjoy a pleasant couple hours and also to be on the look-out for anything on the ground with an interesting texture. I only ended up bringing back three items: a fern frond, a Magnolia leaf, and a whatchamacallit from Araucaria columnaris, the New Caledonia Pine native to Australia.

Eliza spent a few minutes on it today, then lost interest. I'm keeping it out just in case she's more in the mood to try more later. She has been very unfocused today. I think being housebound due to the wildfires has made us all a little stir-crazy. So far, our neighborhood is not threatened (the high school is serving as an evacuation center), but the neighborhoods immediately north and east of ours are under mandatory evacuation orders.

Early Scissors Experience: Stage 3 - Paper Factory

This was just a simple activity to work on scissors coordination. Eliza has her own pair of blunt-tipped scissors that she can use at any time with supervision. Usually, I give her junk mail to cut up, but on Monday and Wednesday of last week, I gave her patterned tissue paper and semi-heavy card stock for a change of texture and color.

Snow Paint

The snow is simply a mixture of flour, salt, and water, which looks like slush on black paper.

This paper was the one she was most proud to show to her daddy when he got home from work. "Look, I made snow!" Funnily enough, Eliza has never touched snow in her life - she has only seen snowflakes and snowmen through picture books.

Here's a video of the process.


Zooming Wheels

I uploaded a video to YouTube, but I haven't figured out how to embed it here yet, and I didn't take a still photo. Eliza took her wooden cars, dipped them in washable tempera paint, and zoomed all over the paper.

First Rubbings

Usually I stay out of Eliza's art explorations, but this time I did about a quarter of the rubbings because she isn't familiar with them, looked confused, and asked for help. Once she saw that patterns emerge when you scribble with the chalk, she thought it was a great activity - she still didn't get it (she would say before scribbling on a random patch, "now I'm going to make a key!"), but she found it entertaining.

chalk hearts

"Look, Mommy, I drawed hearts!" It was her idea to draw a heart (I never direct her art), and she said they were for me. It was the sweetest thing and I thanked her. As far as I know, that was the first time she tried to draw a heart. I noted aloud the curves on the top and points on the bottom but made no judgment. She looked very proud of herself.


She must have had hearts on the brain after playing a sorting game a bit earlier. I found a package of wooden shapes at the arts-and-crafts store and thought she might enjoy those. So I turned it into a Montessori-inspired activity and placed a heart in one bowl. Eliza went about picking out all the other hearts and placing them in the bowl, but once that was done, she thought it would be even more fun to dump all the shapes into the bowls and pour them back and forth. Hey, whatever works! :)