Art: Pirates, Stencils, and Vases

The school year is marching on and I feel at peace this year. One new subject is art. We mostly do spontaneous activities, but today I found this book and gave it a try. Raccoon really enjoyed it. (He got tired so I did the palm tree).

The stencils were something we did the other day. I helped Kitty with the one pictured below.

Another project with his cousin, S, vase decorating.

Book Project, Part II

...here is Part I

My mom is a wealth of office supplies, so she gave me a 3 ring binder and a box of the old computer paper. Remember the kind with holes on the edges that fed through the printer in a one continuous piece? Ah, the memories.

Raccoon had fun helping me tear off the edges, separate the pages, then hole punch them. Voila! His first book was ready for inspiration.

Raccoon decided he wanted to do the illustrations first with crayons. 

He likes to just go for it, then decide later what it is. 

After about ten pages, he was done for the day. 

 

Another day, I added some new pages and decided to try a different approach. With just one marker, he drew the picture as I sat beside him and I wrote the story he told me underneath. I prompted him a few times by asking, "Then what happened?" and I got him started with "Once upon a time..." So here it is:

Once upon a time, there was a ghost named Alfie.

 

Alfie wore glasses. His father was watching him. 

 

There was a sign that said no enter. A man told Alfie he was going to hit him with his big knife.

 So Alfie cut the man's blade off with his knife. Alfie's father was mad. 

(I drew the right page at Raccoon's request, it's the only one 

where he wanted help. I also changed his to the man's for clarity.)

 

"I'm glad you're safe, but don't do that ever again," he said. 

(It seemed odd to me that Raccoon thought the dad was mad 

so I mentioned the safe part and he incorporated it into the story. 

The "...don't do it again" part is pure Raccoon.) 

  

 The man set a trap for Alfie. Traps are everywhere! 

A red line told him do not enter that yard. Bad men will take your food and eat it all.

(Raccoon said red but I wrote purple since that's the color the marker was, 

but I thought better of it and changed it back to red to stay true to his story.)

He crossed the line and a shark ate his food. Alfie decided to go home and eat his lunch.

(When I reread the story to Raccoon later, he told me it should be the bad men

who ate the lunch not the shark, implying that the story made more sense that 

way. His first edit, such fun. I still have to go back and change the original.)

 

Sharing his story with Robin.

A Book Project, Part I

For about a year, I have been telling what we call "Peter and Jon" stories to Raccoon. For months now, he has been making up the stories that he wants me to tell. Sometimes, he is doing most of the telling and I just interject occasional connecting sentences.

Tonight, I was looking back at the things I've jotted down for Raccoon's scrapbook (on notebook pages ripped out of my journals). I wish I had written down more things that he said. I cannot go back, but someday when he's 18, I know I'll treasure what he said at 3, so I can start now.

To bring these two things together, I want to help Raccoon make a book. He'll dictate the story to me and we'll figure out how to illustrate it together. I got the idea from Eva Ridenhour, but it seemed like he was too young. I thought that I would save the idea for later, but I decided to try it now. We are in-between Tot School and a private preschool in the fall, so I think some book projects might be a good idea. We'll see if Raccoon thinks so too.

(This post isn't very fluid, but it's late and I don't have time to edit so I'm going to publish it as is.)


ETA: Here is Part II.

Weekly Review - Miscellaneous

Raccoon is 36 months

This is a very long post, sorry! I didn't think we did much for Tot School until I started looking through my pictures. We did something a little different this week. I didn't have a particular theme, but Raccoon watched several videos on YouTube and then wanted to do activities based on them.

When he watched Be My Valentine from the Richard Scarry's Busytown series (very late at night I confess) he jumped off the couch and told me he wanted to make a valentine for Hilda the hippo so that she wouldn't be sad. I had to support such noble intentions and we got out his "arting stuff" as he calls it.

 

The moose stood in for Hilda since we don't have a stuffed hippopotamus. Satisfied that his valentine and cutouts made her feel better, Raccoon headed off to bed.

 

 

Another day we watched We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen, and went on our own bear hunt in the park, properly armed of course. Raccoon had no intentions of running away from the bear since he wants to be a hunter like his grandfather.

 

 

After watching Curious George's Mulch Ado About Nothing (in Spanish), Raccoon decided he wanted to make some compost too. We put in a banana peel, onion skins, grape stems, and an apple core in his bucket, then Raccoon decided that he wanted to add some water and dirt too. He was disappointed that it didn't smell bad right away like Curious George's compost. I left it outside and he checks on it daily to see if it's decomposed (and stinky!).

 

 

 

We also did a few organized activities, continuing with our spooky theme from last week. You have to check out how one of my favorite sensory blogs turned this pumpkin face page into a magnetic matching activity, brilliant! I used the same idea for the shadow matching activity from this Pre-K Pack. I especially like her recommendation of cutting up advertising magnets, since I can't get plain magnetic strips where I live.

After we did the haunted house, for the first time my son asked if I had more games like this one, so I let my son play with the pumpkin cutouts and matching sheet before I did the magnets. After matching everything correctly, he made up his own game using both sets. Later when he saw that I’d glued the magnets onto the pumpkins, he told me, “We already did that, Mama!” Ah, my son, the king of no-repetition.

Another big event this week (for me, silly mama) is that Raccoon did his first maze. He's done them on his iPad before, but never really seemed to get the concept on paper. I thought he might like the bat and haunted house on this maze so I printed off one. To my complete surprise, he not only got the idea but wanted to do it several times, so I printed off a new one to put in a protector sheet.

Although we're still have printer problems (sigh), I finally did do some of the landform activities I'd planned a few weeks ago. This is him jumping on our couch in excitement, holding his new "map" and a pillow. It's a great landform poster, and the pdf includes the landform mini-books (pictured below) that I used as well. I bought it during one of Scholastic's pdf dollar deals. Sorry, my iPad camera has no idea how to focus on my bundle of energy.

Next he decided that we needed to go on an expedition, and these were the provisions that he wanted to take along - his battle axe, his current best friend "Cheetah," the map, his laptop, and Melissa & Doug's Noah's ark.

Then we made him a boat (a plastic toy box with a rope tied around it for me to pull) for the expedition. Thank goodness we have tile floors. Captain Raccoon would consult his map and tell me where to go. Our couches were plateaus, the floor was the ocean/river, one corner of the room was a cave, etc. And as with all Raccoon activities, the faster he arrived the better!

Later in the week (when I finally finished putting together all of the mini-books), he pretended to be a teacher and "read" or showed each of them to his class of plastic animals.

 

 

But mostly this week we just played with toys we have around the house. One of his recent favorites is this set of magnets. I bought them at a yard sale awhile ago and he likes to "go fishing' with them. He builds himself a pole and I put together some shapes (2D and 3D) for him to "catch." Or we make an aquarium with starfish (below), a zoo with centipedes, or whatever. We usually end by trying to use all of them to make one big cage.

We got out his marble run this week as well, which I finally managed to assemble so that it didn't constantly fall apart. This is fun, but sometimes we both get frustrated with it coming apart before we actually get to use it. It's a great lesson in patience (for both of us!) and in "being gentle." This day we were quite successful though and played with it for maybe a half an hour or so.

His favorite toys are actually his plastic animal/bug collection. We have a large basket full of dinosaurs, zoo animals, marine animals, insects, spiders, etc. and he plays with them again and again. I could write a special post just on all of the uses we've found for his plastic animals (habitats, sorting, classifying, carnivores/herbivores, predators/prey/food chains, classmates, spectators, good/bad guys, etc.). These are some of his newest additions, a birthday present from me to him.

And of course there was lots of pretend play! Here's builder Raccoon making a house.

 

Building Blocks - I made the basic monster and Raccoon decorated it with fences, a giraffe hat, people, plants, etc.

Adding some "thorns" to Mouse's tail.

He doesn't like clipping clothespins to cards, but he loved doing this!

Cooking

 

Cars

 

We didn't do any Raising Rock Star Preschool this week and I hope to resume this next week with the letter Ii.

The End!  :)

Weekly Review - My Body & Monsters



Raccoon is 34 months

Tot school this week - Raccoon was not excited about so much seatwork (aka fine motor), so I changed some of the activities I had planned to make them more active. I didn't re-link to my sources, so please see my activity chart post if you're curious where I got the ideas and materials.

He loves to play "museum," so this often how I sneak some learning into our play. First I laid out the body part pictures, then I told him that a naughty monster had stolen all the signs and it was his job to put them back in the right places. I said the words as I passed him the slips of paper, and he matched the labels to the right body part.

Then he, the museum guard, "fell asleep" and the naughty monster came back and stole all of the exhibits (body part pictures). He did a really good job with both ways of matching.

He did such a good job protecting the museum afterwards that the naughty monster (a cow puppet we call MooMoo) decided to mess up a new exhibit, a picture of a boy.

But the "guard" helped me re-label the boy, and this time we glued them on. Ha! Foiled again evil MooMoo.

Tracing was not a hit, I'm not sure if he didn't understand the concept or just didn't see the point (not pictured but I had a page with lines after the monster one). Oh well. On the monster one, my printer didn't do a good job with the colors so the differences were hard to spot. Since I have my nifty tracing book and dry erase markers, I'm going to try again, perhaps with some homemade sheets. Sometimes I give up on something I think he's not interested in, only to have him ask me for it a few weeks later, so I'd like him to at least see the idea a couple of times before I totally put it away.

I forgot to print out the continent maps, so we did an impromptu art project instead. I did the wavy lines with a paintbrush, then he poured water on the page. Afterwards, I picked it up and let the water run off. I put rolled up towels on either side of his little work table to absorb the extra water.

The end result was a lot more colorful than I expected.

Play doh is one of our most frequent activities. I bought him a nice set of things last month, and we have used it a lot already. He likes to have me roll out a thin piece, then he makes tracks with his plastic animals. He also likes to stack different shape cutouts (we have a circle, clover, diamond, star, and tree). When we first bought the set, the scissors were his favorite.

He liked the number order puzzle. We pretended that he was a doctor putting the person back together. But about halfway through the second one, he decided that it was time for him to be the patient, so we were off to play doctor, then knight.

I mixed up the cornstarch paint, but we don't really have any sidewalks where I live, so we chose a cement wall at our neighborhood park instead. I wish I had a large paintbrush because the sock didn't work very well, it was too hard for Raccoon to manipulate. We ended up just splashing the paint on the wall instead. I also only made up three colors with 1/4 cup each, but if I did it again, I'd probably do maybe 1 cup each.

The Color Changing Milk experiment was very cool. We did it twice, then he used the milk to paint a picture with q-tips. It was so much fun that I forgot to take any pictures until he was all done. (I painted the sun, he hasn't really started to paint anything on purpose yet, he mostly just likes to scribble with the paint).