Day #16 was a simple invitation - the three primary colours, cotton buds and foil to paint/mix on.
Day #17 was an invitation for one as her sisters were at school. My youngest loves bugs so has really enjoyed this book we'd borrowed from the library. We also found some gorgeous stickers at our local newsagent. She drew a lovely garden full of flowers then covered the page with all the stickers. I had thought she might make several pictures but she wanted just to make one for her best friend which is also why I don't have a finished photo as she given it away before I realised I hadn't taken one.
Day #18 was an invitation to draw from real life. I brought some flowering gum from outside and set them up along with a new medium for us - soft pastels. I had posted a similar invitation a while back which you can find here which the girls had asked to do again.
Day #19 and one of my girls wanted to recreate some 'firework pictures' she'd made in a science lesson at school. It turned out it was the milk experiment I'd seen pinned all over the place. You just need a shallow plate of milk, food colouring and some dishwashing liquid which reacts with the milk, making it move, mixing the colours as it goes. My 4yr old enjoyed this so much, she wanted to do these the day after.
Day #20 was a simple one. I'd made up and printed out a few different pages full of frames, added some pencils and let the kids do the rest.
Day #21 was an invitation to experiment - oil pastels and vegetable oil. I seen this idea posted by Kate at Picklebums quite sometime ago but we'd never tried it. Our cotton buds weren't very fluffy so they made it hard to spread the oil around. I'd try it again but with small brushes I think.
Day #22 and it's RAINING!!! That's exciting because it doesn't happen that often here. It also means we can do our challenge to create outside.in.the.rain! In our art cupboard we have some powder paint so I got some out for my 4yr old to shake out onto some paper before taking it outside where we watched the powder turn into paint. Unfortunately, it stopped raining while we were watching so we only got to do one. We have done similar with water spray bottles but using raindrops was more novel.
Day #24 and one comes home from school wanting to make a PowerPoint about wombats as she'd learnt all these facts about them. Instead I showed her how to use the iPad to firstly search for images then use PicStitch to create a collage before using another app, Over, to add text. Of course then the older one wanted to make one too.
Day #25 and this invitation was inspired by a post by the Happy Hooligans. They made these super cute paper dolls -
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| Photo credit - Happy Hooligans |
But given mine all love puppets, I put out some extra wide craft sticks along with a few bits of scrap fabric, wool, fine tip pens, craft glue and a few of bits I thought might be useful.
This is our family :)
Day #26 and I've been reading the book Blocks and Beyond
which I've mentioned before here which talks about children who fold paper in their early years having better spatial awareness. From a square-shaped page, I simply folded it over and over on itself until it looked like this. I can't explain why but this one was one of my most favourite invitations.
Day #27 was borrowed heavily from Elise over at Creative Play Central. Her blog is full of inspiring posts like this one. We love our water play around here and given we also have large sliding glass doors around much of our house, the foam play idea at the end of her post looked like lots of fun.
Day #28 sees me using something else that had been hiding in the cupboard. I'd bought these blank jigsaw puzzles years ago for our playgroup but found the children were too young to use them. My 7yr old and another visiting 7yr old had lots of fun creating these.
My daughter's first puzzle -
Our visitor's -
My daughter's second, more abstract, puzzle -
Of course, if you don't happen to have blank jigsaws sitting in your cupboard like us, you can always just cut up a picture drawn or painted onto lightweight cardboard.
Day #29 was a simple collage invitation. In the same box with the blank puzzles, I found a stack of animal print paper so I put that and this Schleich catalogue out with some glue, pencils and blank paper.
Day #30 saw me reveal to the kids some felt canvases I'd made. I'd seen a post by Kristan at Munchkin and Bean but wanted to make something bigger, that would also stand up easily enough as well. I bought three cheap canvases, sprayed them with fabric adhesive and then stretched the felt over before fixing the sides with double-sided fabric tape. I'll probably staple the sides later but this will do for now.
My kids have always enjoyed playing with their smaller felt boards so we already had some people and clothes for them. For the invitation, I put out lots of different colour felt, scissors and some fabric paint we had. I was interested to see what they would make.
They mostly made more clothes to start but then as they started playing with them on the boards, the stories started too which helped prompt other ideas like the addition of fairy wings...
And then they were off to the beach so lots of different items were required - towels, sunblock, buckets, ball, bathers, hats....
Thanks again to The Art Pantry for their challenge. We had a lot of fun with it.
As it's still school holidays here, we're following Nurture Store's simple play calendar right now. Lots more easy play ideas to be found there.