Soap Drawing

Here’s one of those ideas that happened because I was denied the ability to execute the plan.  The story:

We often plan around a vague theme just so we have a hook to hold on to and have an easier time trying to figure out which bits to extend based on what interests the kids.  We aren’t explicit with the parents about these themes because they’re just a launching pad.  We had been playing with vibrant colors and dark backgrounds as well as black/white/gray.  One day we had planned to use our fancy Bev Bos chalk at one of the tables.  It’s called Bev Bos chalk because we but it from her (she doesn’t seem to sell it on her website or I would have linked it; I think we got it at a conference).  They are large, rectangular bits of chalk that you’re supposed to use wet.  They are very vibrant, particularly on dark paper.  They also have an interesting feel to them when you’re using them, neither draggy like regular chalk nor smooth like slick sticks.

When one of us went to the supply room to pull out the chalk, it wasn’t there.  We couldn’t find who was using it, either.  That probably meant that it was in a room somewhere, drying out from the last class who used it (this stuff takes forever to dry).  We were bummed.  The kids were going through a drawing phase and we really felt they need something to draw with.  About to punt with the crayons AGAIN (white and gray crayons on dark paper, natch), we found a bin with hotel soaps in it.  Jackpot!

The beauty of the soap is that it leaves a nice mark on dark paper.  The mark feels like a crayon mark, which makes you wonder what’s in that soap.  It also smells very nice, adding a sensory dimension that we wouldn’t have gotten with our fancy chalk.  Hotel soaps come in all kinds of fancy shapes, sizes, and scents, so you can get some interesting conversations going about that (you’re doing math when you categorize things, remember?).  You can draw with the skinny edges or the big flat side of the bars.  When the soap gets crumbled and crushed, you know that it’s an easy clean-up as well as a new tactile experience.  Don’t stop the crushing, but do talk about it.  Whether you observe that when a bar of soap gets crushed there are fewer bars left to draw with for others I leave up to you.  If you can't bring yourself to "waste" anything, make some clean mud with the crushed bits and you'll feel better.

If you’ve got mouthers in your class this is only a recommended activity if you can have an adult be right at the table while your mouthers are drawing.  Also, there’s always the risk that there’s an allergen (like milk) in those soap bars.  Luckily the paper wrappers often say what’s in them.

Egg Carton Art

Do you remember waaay back when I wrote about making a garbage garden?  That was lots of fun, but we had egg cartons left over.  What to do?  Clearly, the answer was, paint on them!  This is just plain old tempera paint.  We set out the separated cups as well as the solid lids.

So, why would we do such a silly thing?  Mostly, to let the kids use a three-dimensional surface while applying paint.  Later on we also brought out the crayons and markers, which tested their wrist control and hand-eye coordination. 

What I want you to resist is the temptation to MAKE something out of these.  You know what I’m talking about, right?  CATERPILLAR comes to mind, as does ANT if you’ve put out black paint.  Don’t do it!  Unless you’re working with older preschoolers, who sometimes want to make a product, anything you create with these or help them create isn’t really theirs, it’s yours.  The kids know it’s not theirs and they won’t care about it or play with it later.  Parents will just toss the thing in the trash since they aren’t sure you can recycle things with googly eyes, glue, and pipe cleaners.

If you can’t resist doing things with these, have the kids help you make a mobile for the whole class to enjoy.  Or use them to decorate a patch of dirt, explaining to the kids that over time these little cups of cardboard will help make better dirt for plants to grow in (just be sure you’re using planet-safe paint).  You could even use these as little cups for seeds that you plan on planting later.

Chenille Stems and Styrofoam

I am beginning to feel like the styrofoam crusader.  I love the stuff.  I don’t love what it does to our planet though, so when someone drops me a load of styrofoam and asks if I can do anything with it, I tell them yes.  Better to use it until it’s unusable then to throw it out, right?  You’ve seen us use our brute strength to hammer in golf tees.  Here’s an activity with a little more finesse.

This lovely square of styrofoam was decorated mainly by one child with a little help from a few others occasionally.  She spent a solid 20 minutes carefully inserting chenille stems (pipe cleaners to you old fogies) into the styrofoam.  That’s not an easy task since the stems bend if you hold them too far away from the tip.  So it’s an exercise in fine motor control as well as pressure sensitivity, both important things to develop for writing later in life.

The trick with styrofoam is to find the stuff that doesn’t shred into a million little balls as soon as you start poking it.  That stuff isn’t fit to be used by twos and threes.  You end up chunks of torn styrofoam all over the place and then the custodian comes to talk to you for damaging the vacuum cleaner (again).

After you’re done you can keep the piece in your room as sculpture or have everyone help you pull the stems out again so you can start fresh another time.  Just don’t put it in the landfill!

Under (Very Little) Pressure

It's really difficult to teach something as subtle as “gentle” to a two-year-old.  Last year I had a kid who thought that “gentle” meant he was supposed to give a hug!  Pressure is a difficult concept, particularly when children are still learning what their little bodies can do.  And let’s face it, in preschool we’re always trying to get them to more, not less, so it’s easy to understand why asking for less of something would be confusing.

I like to use gak to let children experience pressure.  I’ve talked about gak before, once with a picture and once without.  It’s a substance that’s fluid when you allow it to move slowly and more solid when you interact quickly with it.

We made gak as a class last week.  This week I set it out on little trays (more about the trays in a sec).  The trick with gak and markers is that the markers only make a nice mark if you use a gentle hand with almost no pressure.  Once you poke it in the marker gets gunked up and doesn’t do much of anything other than make a hole (which is a fine experiment all on its own).  After your gak gets colorful you can fold it or flip it to write some more.

Gak will get to a strange purple-y color after awhile when you’re writing on it.  That’s ok.  Before all the colors mush together you can extend the learning a little bit by folding the gak like you would pastry dough each time you want a clean slate.  Then you can cut into the gak to see all the layers of color you’ve made.  If you’re really on top of it you can have some examples of rocks with layers for comparison.

You will have children who either can’t or won’t press lightly.  If the child in question is frustrated, don’t push it.  Just suggest another activity.  If that child is frustrated but still trying to figure it out, offer assistance but don’t do it for him or her without asking.  With permission, take his or her arm in your hand and demonstrate what it feels like to use very little pressure.  For the ones who insist on poking, give them their own gak (it’s hard to write on bumpy gak) and make sure they have markers that are already dead or something else you can clean off easily.

When I pulled out my gak this time I couldn’t find my handy mini crate from the last time but I found something in the supply room that was almost as good: a dishwasher basket!  It was so fun.  Our gak was a little on the firm side so it didn’t flow as fast, but it was still cool. 

Oh yeah, about the trays.  The trays we use for stuff like this come in two different sizes and are FREE.  We live in a town with several biotech firms.  One of them uses these trays to store sterilized parts for medical devices before they are assembled.  Then they leave stacks of these trays at the recycle center.  They are so clean I really would eat off of them without washing them first (I do wash for the children at school though!).  We use the trays to contain a lot of messy things and for drying artwork.  We tend to use them until they are totally gross and can’t be cleaned out anymore and then we recycle them.  I scored some totally new ones for these photos.  They are so slick to the touch it makes me happy.  Yes, I’m weird.

A Very Preschool Halloween

How do you celebrate Halloween with little ones? Carefully. Some children are easily scared, but most twos really don’t get what all the fuss is about. At our school we focus on the seasonal aspects of Halloween. There’s a lot of orange and black, some extra dress-up available, and subtle room decor changes. Children who wish to wear their costumes to school may, though that’s our everyday rule and not a change for Halloween. Sometimes the whole pre-K class decides as a group to wear costumes and they visit the other classes to show them off.

In my classroom we put some pumpkins out in the kitchen area (above) to change the decorations slightly from our usual fruit bowl. Since we had sand in the sensory table at the same time, you can be sure that everything that started in the kitchen ended up holding sand at some point. We also had plenty of orange and black paper and paint. I’ve resisted trying it in the past, but this year I used the “Make it Shimmer” and “Make it Glitter” paint additives you can buy so that matching paint and paper would show up against each other. I do actually love glitter paint, but I’ve never bothered to make my own with the additives before. I must say I liked the effect, though you can’t really tell from my picture.

Older children have the opportunity to nail golf tees into large pumpkins (like we do with styrofoam), and sometimes we open up pumpkins to show to the children. This year the week before Halloween was short because of fall break and we had many absent children, so we skipped the pumpkin opening. Pumpkins and their guts get dumped in the garden when we’re done so we can watch the vines grow in the spring. Older children are also presented with a variety of face paints in addition to extra dress-up.

The only thing that might be counted as crafty is that we let the kids paint their own mini pumpkins. We tend to stay away from crafty activities because art for twos should be about exploring the medium rather than beginning with an end in mind. Some of the mini pumpkins were so covered in paint it was hard to tell there was a pumpkin underneath!

I didn’t take a picture of it, but we also try to have Halloween books available. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find Halloween books for young twos. Yes, I know that Five Little Pumpkins is a great book/fingerplay. But much of what’s out there seems to be for older kids. I’d love some ideas if anyone has them.

So what do you do to celebrate Halloween with young ones?

Slide Painting

Here’s a fun one for summer, and older preschoolers might not even get that messy.  Roll painty balls down the slide!  Of course, if you don’t want your slide to be painty afterward, make sure you cover it with paper.  This paper makes a great background for displaying children’s art inside once it’s dry.

In this picture you can’t really see what’s at the top, but there are several containers with paint them.  We put bins at the bottom of the slides so that the balls wouldn’t get covered in mulch and would be easy to collect.

For cleanup, use the hose.  If your kids are in bathing suits they can go down the slide with the water, cleaning the slide and having fun at the same time.

Alternatively, you can let kids do the painting AS they slide.  They can dip their hands in paint or use sponges.  I probably wouldn’t use paint brushes because, well, somebody could poke their eye out.  That wouldn’t be pretty!  If the kids do the sliding and painting they will be gloriously messy.  Have a hose or other water toy handy for washing off and lots of towels.

Technorati Tags: outside art,summer fun

Weaving

We have two large weaving looms at school.  Usually we do the warping for the kids with string or yarn and then provide them with all sorts of materials—yarn, ribbon, paper, stuff they find outside--with which to weave.  We also sometimes set out large plastic needles with ribbon if they want to “sew” their materials in.  Sometimes we let the kids warp the loom, but it’s really hard for them to get something all the way across AND lined up because of its size.

The loom itself is a large square someone put together with a matching set of nails on the top and bottom (or right and left, if you’re that kind of person).  I hate to think how hard it was to get the nails all lined up, but they are.  The loom is large enough that several children can work simultaneously in different areas of the loom.

This summer we pulled out the loops, which made the loom something like a big potholder maker.  The loops were made by tie-dyeing t-shirts and then cutting them horizontally, keeping the seams intact.  We have a huge bag of these at school that get reused for various things.

Since we had a day or so with nasty weather this year during camp and some of the kids preferred to stay dry we had several customers at the loom.

And what about the finished product?  Well, there never really is one.  To my knowledge, no one has ever removed a finished piece from the loom and kept it.  It’s all about the process with this one.  I suppose someone could keep it and it would be the size of a large baby blanket.

Dot Painters

Dot painters come by various names: bingo markers, do-a-dots, and dotters, among others. They are simple but can help kids explore a new tool for painting.

Adults usually restrict themselves to dotting with dot painters. But young children don’t have this preconception about what they’re for. They typically drag them like brushes across the page until they see someone else banging them. The child in this picture figured out how to squeeze the bottle so hard the paint dribbled out and then waved the bottle around to make splashes. Luckily Mom knew to dress her child in an old shirt for school, even if it WAS white!

Child often pound so hard that the dots look more like splashes. If you haven’t tried it, do! It’s fun and for adults it’s a little like therapy. Children also like to try to peel the pads off the top. Peeling is one of those things I redirect from since once that top is off you can’t put it back on effectively.

I use dot painters at the easel and on a table for different perspectives. Changing the angle of something makes it a slightly different experience. Dot painters are great to take outside because it’s really easy to clean mulch and dirt off them, which you can’t say for many kinds of brushes.

We have two kinds of dot painters at school. Some are refillable and some are not. The refillable ones take awhile to get the paint from the bottle into the pad, but it’s nice to be able to select your own colors or let the children pick. The non-refillable ones seem to work a little better, but your color choices are limited and sometimes the bottles can’t be reused for anything, which is wasteful. Refill dot painters with liquid watercolor or food coloring mixed with water.

A note of caution: some bingo markers are NOT nontoxic and washable. Buy dotters labeled for use with children.

Record Player Art (and Associated Experiments)

Do you have an old, sturdy record player hanging around?  Use it to make some fun art!

We have two, large, heavy, institutional-type record players that we use for art.  One still has a needle, so we tape down the arms securely.  Since these things are heavy-duty we let the kids control the turntable.  One of them even lets you change the speed.

In general we use paper plates because the turntables are grooved and regular paper won’t sit well on them.  I’m lazy, so I just push the plate on the knob that sticks up from the turntable.  Other teachers punch holes in advance, which does make it a bit easier for the kids.  You can use anything that draws, but markers seem to work better than crayons because you don’t need to press as hard.

Of course, eventually someone will put something on the turntable while it’s spinning.  Usually we spend some time experimenting with different objects and speeds to see what it takes to make something fly off.  Much giggling follows each successful trial, as you can imagine.  Luckily these things don’t get far or fly fast. 

You can also use record players as spin art machines, but you have to be careful not to get any paint on the machine while not blocking the air holes.  Use thinned paint to get it to spread the farthest, and test it before the kids arrive.

What about actual records?  We don’t have any at school anymore, unfortunately.  My own son, when he was in preschool, was asked by a classmate if he knew what a record was (the teachers were overheard talking about them).  In typical kid fashion, he replied:

“I think records are really big CDs for old people.”

Taking Things Outside

As I’ve said, we like to go outside whenever possible.  We sometimes leave our classroom door open so kids can wander in and out to the play yard at will.  When we do that we move some of our usual indoor things outside.

Here is a crayon setup from earlier in the year.  With the twos I often secure paper down so they don’t have to worry about it moving while they work with things that have some resistance, like crayons.  As they get better at it I remove the tape or whatever I’m using to secure the paper down.  This is a picture of a little table that can be flipped over to make a seesaw.  I’ve taped the paper down.  There are actually several layers of paper so I can pull them off as needed without taping down more paper while children are waiting.  At the beginning of the year the children aren’t as attached to the product as they become over the course of the year, so multiple children worked on this piece before someone was ready for a fresh piece of paper.

The picture on the right is a nice musical instrument the music teacher brought outside.  It’s closely related to the xylophone, but darn it all if I can’t remember what its true name is.  Anyway, this is not an outdoor instrument.  It has to be pulled back inside at the end of the day.  The children are used to seeing it in our gross motor room, so having it outside is a real treat.  I took this picture before school started.  I don’t think it sat idle for more than a few minutes all morning. 

In addition to moving things like this outside, we also try to have regular classroom things outside.  In the toddler yard we added a small play kitchen.  For the older children there are various large building toys.  We bring books outside and leave them on blankets or benches.  Obviously, our music teacher comes outside and brings all her cart full of instruments with her.  All of this is in addition to our permanent outdoor offerings, like sand and water (and associated toys), and play structures.  We try very hard to make the outdoors a true extension of our indoor classrooms.

What I want you to notice is that we aren’t afraid to take our indoors out whenever possible.  There are some things that don’t go outside, like our classroom shopping cart, because we’ve learned from painful experience that some of those things just can’t endure the use they’ll get outside.  But we push the limits wherever possible and accept that some things may get used up.

Outdoor Painting on Plexiglass

The weather is getting very nice here and that makes me move everyone outside.  We like to take many of our indoor activities to the play yard when it's nice, but sometimes it's nice to have a little specialized equipment.

This first picture is a plexiglass wall that divides a small deck that stretches between the toddler yard and the 3s/4s yard (we often leave the gate open between them, so this distinction is really in the minds of the teachers only).  It can be painted on from either side.  It's starting to get a little weathered and cloudy, but you can still see through it.  The nice thing is that it's two activities in one.  The kids can paint first, and then clean it off.  We've used brushed with water, sponges, the hose, and wet towels to wash it off, but I'm sure you could think of some other ideas.

Another nice thing to have is a plexiglass easel.  The nice thing about it is that you can move it around, unlike the wall.  We also bring our regular easels out, but we have just one of these see-through ones and it's always a hit.  Maybe the fun is in painting directly on the easel with no paper or that you can see what the other person is doing on the side at the same time.  I don't know, but it's cool.  Sometimes I think the adults are more taken with it than the kids are!

Table-Sized Squishy Bag

Now that I've got the goo, I've got to do something with it.  Since my original idea was to make something large, I got lucky to find a large roll of cellophane slowly getting old in our supply room.  With one piece underneath and another for the top, I sealed it with clear packing tape.  I made three different colors of goo and sandwiched it between the cellophane.  It ended up the size of our small square table.  Now that I write this I wish I'd measured it!

The large squishy bag was passed along to several other teachers before the goo inside got too watery to be fun.  Even once the colors were all mixed together into a weird purple after two days, kids still enjoyed it.

While we value letting kids get messy, there are some children who simply don't like the feel of ooey things on their fingers.  Activities like squishy bags let them get some of the sensations without the part they dislike.  This activity can be done on an easel for a "no mess" day.  One class used it on the light table to much delight.

Allergy note: Because the goo is made from cornstarch, this activity is inappropriate for children with a corn allergy.  Parents might be willing to risk it if the goo is contained like it is here, but there is always the chance it might leak.

Contact Paper Frames

Here's an easy art activity that parents seem to enjoy as much as children. Plus, it's instant window art if you're not feeling very inspired.

First, cut a frame out of paper. I usually pick rectangles because I'm just not that great with scissors. With rectangles you can get several different sizes of frames out of one piece of paper. Then, cut some contact paper slightly smaller than your rectangle. Next, stick the contact paper to the frame. Last, put the contact paper backing back on the frame to keep it from sticking to things before you're ready to use it.

We set out all kinds of things for kids to stick to the contact paper. Tissue paper and glitter are no-fail options. Since you can immediately stick these up in your windows, you can let the kids experiment with how much stuff they can stick before their art won't stick to the window anymore.

As you let the kids work, save the backing paper. If you don't plan on using the frames to decorate at school, when the kids are done use the saved backing paper to protect their art for the trip home. Once home, parents can take off the backing to stick it to their own windows or to back the frame with coordinating paper for display elsewhere.

Ice Cube Painting

(This is the other bad picture I took. I apologize. Hopefully my camera won't do this all the time!)

We love to paint using ice cubes. Generally, this involves a colored ice cube and something to hold it with, like a stick. In the picture above we used cotton swabs instead of the more traditional popsicle stick since the last time we did this all the kids thought they were popsicles. As the cube melts it leaves paint on paper. This has a nice watercolor effect even if you freeze tempera paint.

I've done this with straight liquid watercolor (only for classes that aren't prone to self-painting), watered-down liquid watercolor, food coloring in water, and watered down tempera paint. All of them work well. For the paper I like to use manila construction paper.

When we did this last week the cubes weren't melting very quickly, for some reason. It took a little while, but one child figured out how to warm the ice cube in her hand and then paint. Then you also have a painty hand that can make a handprint, which is what most of them did. It's not often you can capture watercolor handprints, so it was a nice bonus.

We did get one girl who insisted that the red ones were popsicles this time. No matter what we did she insisted on putting them in her mouth, so by the time she was done sucking and we were done throwing out the ones she had put in her mouth everyone had to live with purple paint only. We redirected her several times but she kept coming back as soon as she sensed our attention was elsewhere. Can you tell she's in a testing limits phase? Good thing I really like three-year olds!

Mirror Painting

We like to take our large standing mirror from the dress-up area and use it for painting. Typically we use finger paint, but any paint that's not too watery will do. We put the mirror down on a table so the kids can reach the mirror from both sides. The above picture shows the initial setup. For 3s I let them put the finger paint on with spoons from small cups. This is a fairly messy activity, so while I don't force smocks on anyone I am usually strongly upbeat about wearing smocks while mirror painting.

When the mirror is full, use light colored paper to make a print. The kids love to press the paper down, particularly if there's still a lot of paint on the mirror and you can feel it underneath. This is another great chance to talk about colors and mixing and to use some predictive skills in terms of what colors will happen. I generally stick to primary colors for this reason, sometimes adding white or black to see what happens to one or more colors.

For cleanup, a squeegee or plastic scraper is very, very helpful. We sometimes give the kids small sponges so they can help. If your mirror has a wood frame like ours does, it's a lot easier to get the paint off while it's still a bit damp.

Colored Masking Tape Art

Kids love stickers, but those often sport characters (a no-no at my school). Guess what? They love tape, too! At the easel or around the edge of a table covered in paper I set out small bits of different colors of tape. 2s often need an adult to show them that they can take the tape off the side of the table and stick it wherever they like. 3s usually have an idea of what to do or they figure it out on their own. I also usually leave a few rolls of tape out for those who want to try ripping or cutting their own pieces. And if you have someone who is really, really desperate for stickers, you can cut tape into little squares or rectangles and put those bits on wax paper for the whole sticker procedure.

Once the tape art is complete, kids can take it home right away. No drying time! If tape is old hat, have them cover their tape with paint, markers, or crayon. Then, lift off the tape to see what happens. Now have art using the resist technique and you can talk about positive and negative images and space.

You really can never have too much masking tape, or have too many colors, or have it in too many sizes. My own children like to use it to wrap small toys with paper into "presents" for me. It's very sweet, and they get practice with three dimensional art. They also like to completely cover a paper towel tube and call it a telescope for imaginative play.

Painting With Cars

Painting with cars is fun, and since it's community art you don't need to sort it all out later to get it to the right family (not that I don't want them to have art, I'm just lazy sometimes). All you do is cover a low table or an area of the floor with paper, put out trays of paint, select some cars you don't mind getting painty, and let them at it.

I like to pre-select cars with interesting textures on their wheels and cars with wheels that roll easily. Choose cars with different sized wheels so you can compare them. If possible, find some vehicles that have different numbers of wheels, like trucks, so you can see how the paint lines are different. Cars you can clean later are a must, and if you have any concerns that inappropriate vehicles might make it to the painting area you might want to remove them from the room during this activity. You don't want to spend your time policing, you want to spend your time wondering at all the different marks the cars, trucks, and other random vehicles are making on the paper. Any car I've left in the room is fair game, so if children bring over extra vehicles I let them try regardless of the vehicle's size.

In the photos here we added a road with masking tape (we would have made it more road-like, but we could only find dark blue tape at the time). We have one little boy who likes to run his vehicles in a defined space. If there isn't one available, he'll make one by moving toys off shelves so he has a straight space or putting books down for a road. I didn't expect other kids to use the road, but they did. As you can see, they went around and around, occasionally stopping for more paint but mostly just running the vehicles around. When it was time to clean up for snack all the cars were lined up and ready to be "driven" to the sink for washing.

Rain Activities

Every good children's activity book has a section on rain or what to do on rainy days. Sadly, sometimes the advice is for activities you can do inside until the rain stops. But why? Unless it's thundering or very cold, go outside! Parents often don't want to deal with the wet children who eventually come back into the house, so consider it YOUR responsibility to get kids to experience rain. Yes, that means you have to bring your rubber boots to school.

No matter what the weather, I always keep a few quick activities in my classroom cabinet in case of rain. The most fun is aluminum baking tins. I've had the same ones for several years now. They make a great sound, and different sizes make different tones. Even if you don't go outside, kids can hold the tins out the window or the door to make rain music. Our school's music teacher has talked about making a musical rain instrument out of food cans, so clearly that's another thing to try.

The second thing I keep is dark construction paper to make rain art. This only takes a few seconds, and the children can look at the design the rain made while watching it evaporate. Then they can do it again with the same paper.


The third thing I like to have on hand is something crystalline, like salt or sugar, that will partially dissolve in the rain. It's helpful to put some colored paper on a tray of some kind and use that to hold some crystals. In this picture I've use some colored rock salt that our co-director made a few years ago. We discovered that the large rock salt didn't really dissolve well, but the color did. The kids chose the background paper color. If I had known the rock salt wouldn't do much I might have chosen something lighter.

Speaking of paper and trays, put some paint or watercolor on some light paper, stick that on a tray, and plop it outside for a bit. You'll get some interesting effects.

But please, please, don't stay inside! Put on your boots and go splash in some puddles. Make mud pies. If it's warm enough and the kids have bathing suits, give yourselves some mud facials. Collect the rain and measure (by height, weight, or volume) how much has fallen. Try to track animals, birds, and insects in the rain. Where are they? What does the rain sound like on a raincoat hood? Is it different than the sound on a baking tin? What words can the kids use to describe the smell of the air while it's raining? What about afterwards? Can they tell the air is full of moisture? How? Wonder with them about the rain and you'll be looking forward to each and every rain shower.

Spool Painting

Teachers with whom I share a room left this activity for me one morning as a nice gift. Actually, they left spools on chenille stems and narrow margarine containers. It should have been obvious to me, but I was so tired I had to ask another teacher who happened to walk by what it was for!

Simply string one or more spools onto chenille stems. Dip them in paint, and roll them on paper or whatever you like. While you can use a shallow container to dip the spools in, if you'd like the whole spool submerged you'll need something deeper. I think the kids spent just as much time dunking as painting, and the clear margarine containers were so interesting some kids just wanted to watch the paint slosh around inside them.

I later came to find out that we have a box labelled "spool painting" in our supply room. All I can say is, man, do we have a lot of supplies!

Puffy Paint

Here's a recipe for an easy puffy paint.

- shaving cream
- white glue
- liquid watercolor

Every teacher I know has a slightly different proportion of shaving cream to paint. I add them until it feels good to me when I stir it. The watercolor is added after you like the way the white mixture turned out.

Yes, you can paint with just the shaving cream and the watercolor, which we also do. Adding the glue prevents the shaving cream from disappearing into nothingness when it's dry.