Snow Days

For our first week back at school our theme was Snow, which was fitting considering we came close to having a snow day our first day! This theme was particularly fun for me because it presented so many opportunities to make Art a sensory experience for the kids. We used puffy paint, sponge-paint with stencils, we explored vertical drips with glue, and we used several textures to create our snowmen. I wanted to share two of my favorite (and more importantly, two of the kids' favorite) art projects from this week.

The first one was “Snow Tracks”, inspired by the book The Snowy Day.

For this project, I mixed up puffy paint (1 part glue, 1 part shaving cream, and just a tad of white tempera). The kids painted their entire paper with the paint first. Then I had a bowl full of objects for them to drag through their “snow” to create different shapes and textures, like combs, golf tees, and straws. They had free reign over how they wanted to use each object. What was fun was seeing how differently they all used the objects.

The second project we did that I loved was “Snowflake”.

This was a practice in understanding stenciling, a concept which is tough for 3-year olds to get. Many of them painted on the stencil, expecting that to be their final product. It took quite a bit of prodding to get them to paint around the edges of the stencil, but it was a great exercise. For this project I created simple 6-armed stencils with construction paper which I “laminated” in masking tape so they wouldn't get too soggy after being used by 35 kids! Then I let each child choose where they wanted me to place 6 small pieces of masking tape to secure the stencil-- this made each snowflake (proverbially) unique. Then the kids used sponge brushes to paint in blue, white, and purple. They loved getting to mix up the colors, and getting to paint with something other than a brush.

I hope these are useful ideas for your winter plans, either at school or at home with the tiny humans!

(Belated) Christmas How-To

This Christmas I gave homemade hot chocolate for the second year. Last year it seemed to be a hit, so I decided to do it again, but I also wanted to step it up a notch. So I added very cute (and yummy) peppermint marshmallows!

This was probably one of the easiest homemade gifts I've ever given, but that doesn't mean it wasn't also delicious (I may have taste-tested one or four times...) If you want to give it a try, here's what you'll need:

An empty glass jar (I just saved my pasta jars, washed them, and used Goo-Gone to get rid of the sticky label stuff on the outside)

1 cup baking cocoa

1 cup sugar

1 cup powdered milk

½ tsp salt

Jumbo marshmallows (I put 4-6 in each bag)

chocolate chips for melting

crushed peppermint candies

To make the cocoa I just layered the powder ingredients in the glass jar. I glued cute paper to the lid to make it festive and attached the recipe:

“Add 1 cup hot water to 1/3 cup mix”

If you're like me you can add ½ cup mix.

To make the marshmallows, I melted the chocolate chips in a microwave-safe bowl in 20-second increments to make sure it didn't burn. Then I rolled a marshmallow in the chocolate, and then rolled it in the crushed peppermints. I set the marshmallows on a chilled plate to set, then packed them in these handy-dandy treat bags I found on sale!

The end result was very cute: