Garden Art

I am really enjoying our gardening theme this month and all the fun activities that have been provided  for us.

We have been able to do a lot of fun art projects this week.  I love art as a means of teaching concepts and engaging children in learning.  When I worked as a speech language pathologist, I found the children were more willing to work when they got to do something fun, such as an art project.  Art is also a great way to teach language and math concepts such as size and color, ordinals (like first, second, last) and reinforce vocabulary.  You can also work on narrative skills as you have a child tell you (or another family member) how they created their masterpiece, what they did first, what materials they used and why they them.  You can use art to retell a story you have read (just search Pinterest for art projects related to children's books) or to reinforce concepts you have taught, like we have been doing with our Mother Goose Time projects.

For Mother's Day, they included a Bonus Day lesson plan that had the materials (minus paint) for an adorable art project that I know I will be keeping for years to come.  We talked about how plants have stems, looked at some of the plants in my yard and then made this cute handprint art.  They counted out flowers for each finger and glued them on.  There is also a cute little poem included so in one project we covered math, literacy and science.

We talked more about stems and how they help move water through the plant as we did a little science project using celery stalks and colored water.  We then used cut up pieces of celery to stamp paint onto flower coloring pages as an extension of the lesson.

The other fun art project we completed this week was making these super cute sunflower headbands.  We talked about leaves, counted petals on flowers outside, talked again about seeds and how baby plants sprout from them (this was reinforced with a bean sprout experiment that is still in process on my windowsill) and had the kiddos count out sunflower seeds and arrange them however they wanted to on the flower cut out.  When it comes to art, I try really hard to let Miss M do the majority of it herself (at least as far as design--she still needs help with the construction) so she gets the experience and confidence to do things herself without the emphasis on having it look "perfect", hence the clump of seeds with no particular pattern.

Art is so much fun to do with toddlers and preschoolers, I love the conversation it stimulates and having tangible evidence of time we get to spend together.