It’s been raining non-stop for two days here. Time to switch on the fairy lights in the kitchen, pull out our favourite gingerbread recipe and enjoy some cosy autumn baking :: we’re making fall leaf cookies!
Salad spinner painting
This craft was meant to be. We’ve wanted to have a go at spinning art for a while, so last week I went out to try and buy a salad spinner. As we were intending to get it covered in paint I didn’t want to spend a fortune on one but in any case fate intervened. As I walked passed a charity shop, guess what I spied on the shelf inside? One salad spinner! Sold.
Salad Spinner Painting.
You will need: a salad spinner, paper plates or circles of paper/card to fit in the spinner, runny paint, glitter is optional
You can use one big circle of card which fills the whole of the base of the spinner, or you can put several smaller circles of card in the base and put paint on each one. These smaller ones are good if you’re making gift tags.
1. Check if your salad spinner has drainage holes in the botton and if it does, sit it on a plate or tray to catch any paint.
2. Place your paper plate or circle of paper / card in the bottom of the salad spinner basket. It’s a good idea to hold it in place with a piece of Bluetac.
3. Put some blobs of the runny paint on the plate / paper / card.
4. Replace the lid of the spinner and get spinning.
5. Take off the lid to check your design. Do you want to spin again? Add some different colours? Sprinkle some glitter on while the paint is still wet?
We’re going to use our designs to make Christmas decorations and gift tags, by punching a hole and adding some ribbon.
This spinning technique is also great for trying out colour mixing – add a blob of blue and yellow and spin to make shades of green.
You could make a fantastic mobile from your paper plates, or turn them into planets to make a space scene.
Have you tried salad spinner painting? How did you use your designs?
happily shared with Tot Tuesday and ABC and 123
Junk model nativity
This article is one of NurtureStore’s easy Christmas crafts for children and part of our Christmas activities and crafts.
Do you have a nativity scene your children can play with? Advent begins today and I know my girls will spend December dressing up as kings, reading Christmas story picture books and generally bursting into a round of Away In A Manger at any opportunity.
We have a beautiful nativity scene which decorates our sitting room each year but it is too delicate for the girls to play with, so this year we decided to make a version the girls can use. And you’ll probably guess what are figures are made of: paper rolls.
The figures were made by wrapping fabric and card around the tubes and glueing into place: a very simple design the girls can make with just a little adult help, and giving them their own nativity to play with to their hearts content.
More Christmas activities and crafts
See our full index of Christmas activities, lesson plans and crafts for even more great ideas.
Shape garland
Did you see the marble painting we did yesterday? It was great roly-poly fun and we decided that instead of just adding to our picture gallery we would use the designs to make a shape garland.
We had lots of chat about which shapes we would use and decided to stick with circles, squares and triangles, as the children would find them fairly easy to cut out themselves.
We went on a shape hunt to find objects the right shape and size to draw round and then we cut them out.
We used our fingers to trace round the outside of the shapes and count how many sides they had.
We did some shape sorting, making piles of circles, triangles and squares.
We talked about size and lined each shape up from biggest to smallest.
Then we used sticky tape to fasten our shapes onto thread and hung up our garland to decorate our room. The mobile looks beautiful as it twirls around.
That’s a lot of fun learning from one simple activity. How do you teach shapes to your children?
Marble painting
We love marble painting. We love the crazy patterns you can make, we love the roly-poly fun and we love how vibrant the final paintings are. Marble painting is a good craft activity to try with children who usually prefer action play to something artistic – you might just find that this rolling-action appeals, when normal painting or drawing doesn’t.
If you have a group of children you can try this on a grand scale: go outside and have the children sit around a huge piece of paper. Add some blobs of paint around the perimeter of the paper and give the children some marbles. They can roll the marbles to each other across the paper and make a collaborative design.
For a smaller scale version at home, we find a roasting tray is a good size to fit an A4 piece of paper, and of course the raised edges of the tin help to contain the marble. Add a blob of paint and practise your co-ordination as you tilt the tray to roll the marble through the paint. What patterns can you make if you add different colours of paint, or roll 2 or 3 marbles at once?
This is a fun, creative activity to try just for the pleasure of crafting but it creates wonderful pictures you can use to make into something else too: bookmarks, greetings cards and postcards, gift tags? Come back tomorrow and see how we transformed our marble paintings into a mathematical display.
Children’s self-portraits
Fill your winter with colour!
Click here to get your Art Spark resources.
I’ll guide you through four weeks of beautiful and fun art projects that you can enjoy with your children. At home or at school, these process art projects will give you an interesting framework of activities that you can weave into your weeks, so your children are engaged, creating and enjoying themselves all through art. See more details of Art Spark here.
Following on from our faces book, how about trying to draw self-portraits?
Drawing Self- Portraits
Sit your child in front of a mirror to let them have a really good look at themselves. With young children you can name the different parts of their face and have them pull funny faces. Encourage older children to look in much more detail – at the colours in their iris and the different shades in their hair. Is their face really a circle shape? Are both sides perfectly symmetrical? Do they look like someone else in the family?
Then get creating. You can draw with just one colour, or paint, or even make a collage with wool for hair. Younger children are likely to produce very simple portraits – but, having had a good look at eyebrows and eyelashes in the mirror, they may surprise you by adding in some new details to their picture.
It’s always good to lead the way and show how adults can be crafty too – so why not have a go at your own portrait alongside them?
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