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Friday, February 26, 2010

Friday Craft Corner


This week was a simple craft, we finger painted. I love fingerpainting but we don't do it very often. This is possibly due to the almost two year old in the house =) But after how well it went on Tuesday I think we will bring them out more often.

We have four colors in our basket- red, yellow, blue and green. Four is more than enough with my kids. I start out by putting small dollops of the colors directly onto the paper. Of course they each just have to start out with all four colors. For this reason four colors are plenty. Plus they mix on the paper and can make lots of different colors

When Madeline first started fingerpainting when she was about 2 1/2 I used large sheets of paper, but not the special finger painting paper. I am frugal about arts and crafts and at almost $7 a pad the finger painting paper just struck me as a waste. Well, after many paper rips, messes and crying I decided to splurge on real finger painting paper. It was SO SO worth it.

I also put both kids in smocks. What did we use for smocks? Daddy's old white t-shirts. They are huge but they work so well. They covered the kids completely and they didn't cost me a dime! How awesome is that?

Owen started out just using his index fingers. He was a little uncertain. By the end he was full out into it using hands and arms to smush it around. he kept asking for "mo" paint. I would turn his paper so he could use the paint that was splotched in different areas before adding more to help with drying time.



Madeline got into it right away. Then she started mixing colors to see what would happen. I did NOT let this learning opportunity pass me by. We talked about what would happen if we mixed red and blue, red and yellow, blue and yellow. The she tried mixing yellow and green and said "it didn't change!" So we talked about it a little. Then she lost interest and went back to her masterpiece.



All in all the rugrats spent about 20 minutes quietly painting. They each made two pictures. The clean up took me all of 7 minutes, including washing hands, and it was well worth it. We will be using finger paints again in the near future!


3 comments:

Ticia said...

Heading over from the Art Box, I'm amazed yours didn't end up brown blobs. My kids always end up with brown blobs after we paint..... Oh well, it's fun to do.

Julie said...

Fun! I'm always afraid to pull out the finger paints but the kids do enjoy it. Like Ticia, we end up with a lot of brown blobs, though.

Nicole {tired, need sleep} said...

How fun! I loved it when M would finger paint... everything ended up a brown blob like Ticia said, but he enjoyed it SO much! I'm glad your kiddos had fun. :) Thanks for linking up!