April 2012
9 posts
The Very Best Kind
April 26, 2012
I love doing sculpture with preschoolers; I love getting them to think three-dimensionally. My first ever blog entry was about a mammoth Styrofoam sculpture, done in blocks and stuck together with bamboo skewers. It’s gone now. Pieces started falling off and I finally decided to get rid of it to make room for some newer piece. I decided that I wanted to do a wire...
An Old Project, A New Idea
April 24, 2012
We’ve done this project every spring for the last three or four years. We hang a balloon over the table and the kids cut pieces of yarn, dip them in bowls of white glue and cover the balloon. Sometimes I have to help a bit, with some long pieces of yarn wrapped around the balloon to catch the hanging ends of their yarn.
Then it’s moved out in the hallway where it...
For My Own Delight
April 20, 2012
I’m going to take a break from blogging (or perhaps bragging…the new stuff is pretty terrific) about the things we got through our grant. I want to talk about a project we did this week, a project we’ve done every year for at least the last ten years.
It begins with a shower curtain liner, preferably a clear one or, at the very least, a frosted one. Because it...
More New Stuff
The 18th of April, 2012 (The British are coming! The British are coming!)
When we got the refillable blocks, we also got (among other things) a set of refillable kaleidoscopes.
They’re about eight inches tall and the top is Velcro-ed on, so that’s where the beads or tissue paper or whatever go. The class had a lot of fun deciding what to put in each of the six kaleidoscopes. In...
New Blocks!!
April 14, 2012
We got a grant recently from First Things First that enabled us to buy a lot of new stuff for our class. (Actually each classroom at our school got a grant.) I’ll probably be blogging about several of our new things, but today I wanted to feature our new wooden blocks. We already have a great collection, probably more than any other classroom, because we keep ours outside...
Melting Crayons
April 12, 2012
Most preschool classes melt crayons while drawing on a warming tray. OR they lift prints from melted crayons on a warming tray. OR they melt crayons in a cup on a warming tray and pour the wax onto the picture. We’ve done all of the above. But I’ve been intrigued by some pictures on the Internet of crayons glued to a board and melted down the board with a blow...
Our Guerilla Art Project
April 10, 2012
Remember back in February when we left postcards around town, hoping they’d be passed from amateur artist to amateur artist? They were stamped and addressed to us, with a request that they be in the mail by April. I believe I also mentioned that I didn’t have much hope that we’d get more than one or two back, perhaps none at all. Well we got THREE...
Ephemeral Art →
April 8, 2012
Years ago (actually a couple of computers ago) I saw this video and asked my husband to download it for me. (You can see it at Youtube now. Search for Ilana Yahav Just Imagine. Sorry that the link above doesn’t seem to be working.) This turned out to be the hardest part of the project. It was on a Korean site and it downloaded very slowly, so slowly in fact that he kept...
Nothing Goes to Waste
April 5, 2012
Remember this?
We covered a free canvas (thank you, Art Resource Center) with bottle tops, also free. It really looked good and we even exhibited it at the church that houses my preschool. Then it went up on one of our bulletin boards. It hung there for a couple of weeks and then a couple of the tops fell off. I glued them back on. In fact I did that for about a week and...
