Shapes & Toddlers

I occasionally go to the library and just LOOK around for better ideas to teach my toddlers. One such day I was looking at all types of shape books and just happened to come across this gem! It is called "Shape Capers" by Cathryn Falwell - it rhymes, is fun and engaging for toddlers but best of all they have a repetitive line that can easily be made into a game AND they make all their shapes into different things at the end of the book - and if you are a teacher you are already on the same page - instant art project!!

 

This is exactly what I did. I read the book to my kids. Then I made this handmade "Shake the Shapes" game which can easily be made out of any cylinder container (I made mine out of a chocloate covered pretzel container from Christmas). (In the middle of the container I covered it with a solid color paper and then wrote with sharpie on the front "Shake the Shapes".) I said the repetitive line of "shake, shake, shake, shake the shapes" and then asked what shape will ______ pull out? And then I let each child in turn pull out one shape from my jar and we had to identify what shape they pulled out!

When we were done with all that I used the picture from the book to make the spaceship out of the shapes we learned about. The kids loved seeing their art next to the picture in the book. It helped them relate and brought the book to life!

It was a wonderful resource and after returning my copy to the library I purchased one to keep in my classroom! If you are teaching your toddler shapes (or are a toddler teacher like me) I highly recommend this book to you!

Thanksgiving Placemat Craft: Indian Corn

Every year our teachers make place mats for our school wide Thanksgiving Feast! Last year took a lot of work as I had the toddlers make a TON of yellow, red and brown dots to make Indian Corn. I was determined to find an easier place mat for young toddlers this year. I accomplished my task!! Check out what I found:

 

 

This is one of the place mats we made this year. The outside are simple pattern sponge rollers you can find at most teacher or craft stores. I did 2 or 3 each of the different patterns. One was polka dots, one was a plain stripe and so on. Some I did all four sides and some just the outsides. It's up to you!

 

The main part of it is the kids hand print. You can trace their hand and cut it out or you can capture the actual hand print as I did by painting their hands yellow and making a hand print on a plain white piece of paper. Then cut out around their hand print. Next take a hole punch to some dark and light brown paper and glue sporadically onto their cutout hand. I free handed the simple corn stalk out of green paper and the banner out of yellow. I even outlined the yellow banner myself with a sharpie marker. Then I personalized with their name and the year.

 

SO SIMPLE yet so pretty and a great keepsake for years to come! Make sure and laminate or the food will ruin them!

Chocolate Pudding Art

For the beginning of October I'm having my students create a huge "Chocolate Pudding Pumpkin Patch" in our classroom! But I had never done the first and most important part of this art before, the chocolate pudding part! So I did mini versions at home with my own kids to have them test it out! They were all for it of course!

So first off you simply make chocolate pudding. My recipe called for 3 cups of milk but I'm not about to waste that much milk on something I'm not eating so I made it with 2 cups of water and 1 cup of milk so it would at least keep it's creamy texture. Once it's made you simply slop a little on some paper (I recommend card stock so your paper won't rip to pieces with the moisture). Then swirl around! I had a basting brush that has individual plastic strands that we used and it created beautiful swishes and swirls! However for my toddlers I had little plastic cars that are easy to clean that they drove through the pudding! And of course you always had a couple of them that were far more interested in painting with their hands so they could then lick the remains off! This is the beauty of this art project - it's safe if your baby attempts to eat the paint!

Here was my daughter's painting. The first one, pictures above, was my son's.

And this was mine! Took about 5 seconds to make. Now if they're older and you are trying to make a more "accurate" pumpkin patch have them make straight lines of rows like a real field would be.


Next, since again this was a smaller version I found some print-outs online of scarecrows and pumpkins. My children picked which scarecrow they wanted and then they colored away! I also had them cut all of them out and glue them on their chocolate pudding (once it was dry). And their chocolate pudding pumpkin patch was complete:

My daughter's.

My son's.

My son wanted his taken in the window too :)

Now at my school each day was a different art project to add to our creation. First we did chocolate pudding art on a big sheet of bulletin board paper. The next day we sponge painted pumpkins. I used big star burst sponge brushes but any kind of sponge or other paint option will do!

Next came our scarecrows. I found a cute scarecrow and had each child water paint them. I was going to try to have them "water paint" with ice cubes but couldn't get the ice cubes made on time this year. Maybe next year.

Then just to make it look nicer I matted the kids pumpkins with some green paper. And then stick them all on your dry chocolate pudding!

For one and two year old kids - this was a BLAST! And they love it hanging in our room because they can point at them all day and you can go over and reiterate the names of each thing and the colors. As for my own kids smaller versions I'm probably hanging them on their bulletin boards or perhaps sending them to the grandparents as a "Happy Fall" picture!

Either way or on either scale it's SO fun and your kids freak out a little when you hand them chocolate pudding to PAINT with!