Children's crafty stuff

I discovered, quite by accident, that my son likes to do directed craft. He had shown absolutely no interest in painting or drawing, so I had not really tried to do any craft with him until Easter this year, when, in desperation and boredom, we made Easter chicks with two yellow circles and a black pen. And he loved it! I was flabbergasted. So I've decided that I need to do more cutting and glueing and directed craft.

The little guy is fascinated by thunderstorms - terrified and fascinated. He is constantly wanting to look at thunderstorm pictures and was very taken with the idea of making his own one. I took some cotton balls, some blue sugar paper cut into strips, and some backgrounds. The children drew their backgrounds on to the paper, and then helped me tear the blue paper into "raindrops". My son didn't really do this - but the 6yo loved it. When we had enough rain, we painted glue onto the paper, stuck on cotton ball "clouds" and blue raindrops and let it all dry. Then we added some glue streaks which we glittered for lightning. Voila! 6yo picture looked like this:



My son, though, wasn't happy with his picture. Apparently, there should be thunder that goes "Boom!". So we added some, which my mom and I wrote and he cut out, and he stuck a random piece of paper onto his picture because it kind of fitted, I suppose. The final 2 year old version:



The red circles in the background are "children in the rain". So now you know. I liked the fact that they were given the same equipment, and the same instructions, and produced two totally different pictures. Also that despite the 4 year gap, they both enjoyed doing this.

We also did some marble painting this break. I saw it at my son's nursery school and loved it. It requires virtually no set-up, and both children got great results. (I used an unused cat litter tray and tempera paint squirted straight into it. None of this "roll the marbles in the paint" stuff - way too much work!) The plan was to use the marble paintings as spider webs, and add spiders, but my daughter decided that her marble painting was "too special" and made a new web.



My son was quite happy to use his "web", only he really, really, wanted to play with his spider.


We made the spiders by cutting a small polystyrene ball in half, and gluing 4 twisted pipe-cleaners onto the bottom, then bending them up for legs. This wasn't as sturdy as I would have liked. If I did it again I think I would cut the pipe-cleaners in half, dip them in glue and wedge them into the ball bodies. We then painted them with normal tempera paint, waited for it to dry and drew on the faces with gold and silver markers. It was fun :).

My daughter's spider has a smile, and, though you can't see it in this pic, a tiny gold dot for its spinnerets:


My son's spider has LOTS of silver eyes, as well as, apparently due to a spinneret confusion, lots of gold bums.