For this month's Toddler Art, we kept the Independence Day theme and had fun with paint and construction paper.
I read Red, White, and Boom by Lee Wardlaw. It's a quick story about celebrating with a parade and fireworks.
The little ones began working on their crafts. We had all sorts of motor skill practice making our own red, white, and blue flags using paint. This group also used clothespins and pom poms, but I modified the template for this group to make it more simple and dilly-dot like.
Their next craft was making a smiley star. I think they had fun with both crafts, but enjoyed the takeaway of this one better and just appreciated using paint in the first craft. I cut up some larger stars, used our die-cut machine for smaller ones to use as the hands and feet, and white strips of paper for the arms and legs of our star. We drew our smiles on and used eye stickers.
I can't wait for next month's theme, at the beach, because I have some good ideas planned and there are so many options. Plus, who wouldn't want to be at the beach?
What a turnout! This was such a fun, big group! I had most of my registrations show up and had some drop-ins as well. I had enough craft for everybody because I usually plan for extra and I think everyone had a great time.
We all really enjoyed listening to The Night Before the Fourth of July by Amy Wummer. These Night Before books are always so fun and rhythmic to read. The group loved this book and I read it a second time after we were done with our crafts.
The pom pom flag craft we did was great practice for them to get used to painting and the windsock seemed to be the favorite of the two crafts. I used printouts, red and blue pom poms with red and blue paint, and q-tips for white star dotting to come up with our pom-pom flag craft.
Our second craft was a red, white, and blue windsock. I used cut-out blue construction paper for the base, die-cut red and white stars, and red and white streamers. We used red ribbon to hang it up.
This was a fun way to see one of my favorite groups and celebrate Independence Day!
