Little Artists is a monthly program for children ages 2 to 5 who want to explore their creative side. After reading a few stories, we have an activity that focuses on the process of making art, rather than the end product. We sometimes get messy, and we always have fun.

This is the recipe I used on 03/04/2010.  If you have ideas for ways I might tweak it next time, please leave them in the comments!

Books to read:

• Curious George Goes to the Beach by the Reys’ ghostwriter
• Gotcha, Louie! by H. M. Ehrlich (text) and Emily Bolam (art)
• Miranda’s Beach Day by Holly Keller

The project:

We created a little science experiment to test whether sand (the colored craft store kind) sticks better when you use a glue stick or white glue.  The consensus was that the glue stick worked better, although the first answer I got was from one of the parents, which was kind of missing the point.  Parents don’t like white glue, because it’s messy and runny and takes forever to dry.  But guess what?  I don’t do this for the parents.  And it seems pretty obvious that some of the kids would never get to do something like this otherwise.

What worked:

I don’t know about the kids, but this definitely helped me a little bit with the winter blahs.

The kids were even more creative than I imagined.  One girl kept layering glue over sand over glue over sand, etc., and then she stirred it into a soupy swirl at the end.  Incidentally, it was her mom that said the glue sticks work better.  I need to remember to fill that glue bottle…

What didn’t:

Toward the end, I realized I could have created a beach/summer playlist so we had something to listen to after the stories were done.  I suppose my excuse is that I’m not used to Little Artists being so thematic, but it was definitely a missed opportunity.

[ Posted in » Little Artists :: Storytime Recipes ]