I love being able to share these classes with you guys! I love that you can get a sneak peek into what class looks like, and hopefully it gives you an idea of what to expect when you book a class with me!
Well this week is all about color mixing and learning the color green. We are soaking up every last ounce of summer before switching gears to fall themes and boy did we have fun with it today in our Toddler Art Play Class!
Toddler Art Play sessions are 45 minutes long. We start with a couple of minutes playing on the welcome mat with a manipulative toy like foam blocks, Duplo Legos, tubes and gears, etc. This allows us to let all of our friends arrive, time for me to learn names, and introduce our stations to grown ups. Grown ups are required to supervise children for this class. Toddler Art Play is station based and there is no formal teacher instruction. Preschool classes have a lesson, but the toddlers need to just explore on their terms! So after I explain each station to all the grown ups and show kids what to do, off they go! It's so fun to see what each child chooses first!
This week, our collaborative station was the mixed media sticky collage! I love collaborative art with young children. With their short attention spans, you turn something small into something larger and more involved. In our 4 week sessions, we like to take these projects and elaborate on them each week sometimes too. For example, take a large painting we did week 1 and add tissue paper squares on top and then the next week draw with black marker. It turns into this amazing art piece that can be cut and shared between families or kept for the host family. I can't wait to share more about these soon!
Kids worked their fine motor skills and stuck all of our green items all over the sticky paper to create this awesome collage! So much sensory discovery here too today!
Our second station was all about color mixing. We talked about how we were doing green things today but I didn't give them any green paint, only yellow and blue. They quickly discovered that if they mixed them they got the perfect green to paint our giant stick!
Station 3 was so much fun and perfect for wrapping up summer art this week. We did frozen painting! Mix 3 parts water with 1 part tempera paint in ice cube trays for these amazingly bright colored paint popsicles!! As the blue and yellow melted together they made such beautiful green marks. This was also our optional take home project this week. In our Toddler Classes, one project is always set up so you can take them home if you'd like. Some people do, some just leave them, either is fine by me but I always want to give you the option!! I'll be sharing ways to turn these process art take home pieces into something for your fridge soon!
Our final art station this week was spray paint tie dye. We used a giant paper tablecloth and spray bottles of watercolor paint (watered down) to make this fun tie dye effect and continue talking about color mixing. This is a great way to build hand strength but make sure to enforce spraying on the paper only! This is always one of the favorites and perfect for summer art outside!
As little kids have quite short attention spans, they are able to hop from station to station as much and as long as they want. When we have about 15 minutes left of class, I pull out our sensory tub of the week and a coloring activity. This week we used paint sticks to color butcher paper wrapped around a tree trunk but I somehow didn't get any pictures of that one! Oops! Our sensory tub was green rice, flowers and frogs. Kids love these tubs and that's why I like to wait until the end to open them because some kids will never leave them to do any other art!
What a great class! All our toddler classes run with this format. Open play on the welcome mat, 4 art stations, a coloring experience, and a sensory tub. We learn art terms, use our creative skills, explore our senses, practice turn taking and sharing, work on fine motor skills and hand strength, practice social skills, and so much more in this 45 minute class! It's such a great way to spend some time with your kids and help them with their development in a fun, engaging, and age appropriate way! We can't wait to help you host a class with your friends!
- Taylor
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