I have always tried to provide art opportunities for Rowen at home but lately I have been pretty lazy. Rowen colors/draws/writes on paper often at the kitchen counter while I cook dinner or make lunch. I also give him stickers to stick onto paper and then color over or fold up. This is also great for his small motor control. He also plays with play dough, loving to create all sorts of food and animals for us to play with!
However, it feels like it is so much work to get the paint, glue, and scissors out and clean it all up but once I do it I realize once again that really it isn't that much work at all. And the enjoyment Ro gets out of it is worth every second of set up and clean up. I recently went to a workshop that was about building healthy kids through art and I came home inspired to get the mess out again on a regular basis for Rowen to experiment with. Below are only a few photos of Rowen's recent art work.
Rowen did some drawing with Grammy and Papa over the weekend. In Rowen's own words, "That is a face." The zig zag line is a "mad mouth". The sun looking object is "a sun" and the other circle with lines coming out is "a spider".
Another "face" and "a snowman".
Painting with polka dot paints, corks as stamps, paintbrushes, and fingers.
As daddy said when he walked into the dining room, "Smurf hands!".
Rowen started to paint his hands and I decided to just let him do it. One of the things I learned in the workshop is that it is important for kids to have that experience early on. First, it is only natural for them to want to feel the paint spreading over their skin and second, so that they know what it feels like, then maybe they won't do it in Kindergarten, First Grade, etc every time their teacher gets the paint out!
