Last week both kiddos were off of school for MLK day. Instead of our usual science-type activity, we mixed thing up a bit and went for a pre-planned (crazy, I know!) art activity. This was great fun and ended up taking the better part of the day. First off, I've gotta say that I completely stole this idea from one of my favorite "kid blogs" http://happyhooligans.ca/ We started out by talking about Vincent Van Gogh and looking at some pictures of his paintings online. This brought up some really interesting questions from Owen about mental illness. Not quite the direction I had planned to go, but that's OK, we went with it. Next we started painting our "canvas" of foil covered cardboard.
After the paintings dried (and while Ben was napping) I grated a bunch of our crayon stubs. I learned several things from this:
- carpal tunnel and graters don't mix
- skinned knuckles bleed ALOT (and are really hard to put band-aids on)
- cheap-o crayons have some weird type of static properties when placed in foam bowls, specifically, they jump out kinda like popcorn
- steam mops and crayon shavings don't mix.
In hindsight, I'm really glad I didn't let the boys do this part of the activity!
After nap-time, the kids sprinkled the shavings onto their paintings. Then we put them in the oven for a few minutes to melt the wax. This was Ben's favorite part of the day :)
And here are examples of our finished products! The top one is Ben's favorite, the bottom one is Owen's favorite. All-in-all we had a great time and I've decided I may have to try more art projects.
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