Book Love: The Black and White Factory

I stumbled upon a new book at the library a few weeks ago, and it inspired this art project for our Creative Kids Art Play class.

The animals in The Black and White Factory have really specific rules about their factory, and that includes no color and no messes! But then one day, some colors start to creep in and they try everything to stop it from ruining their factory. This book is interactive and funny, and I love the way the characters embrace the mess in the end. It's such a perfect story for encouraging creative and exploratory art play.

Connecting Activity
I set out black (dollar store) frames over white paper with some colored glue, and the kids jumped right in to add some color to their "black and white factories."

A few tips for trying this with kids:
#1- When I researched this activity, most tutorials suggested using hot glue to seal the glass frame so that glue doesn't leak out. I would add that you should be very generous with the amount you use, both in front of and behind the glass. I thought I had done enough, but I still had problems with leaking glue and it was messy!

#2- Preschoolers love the process of squeezing and watching the paint fill up the frame. As such, there is a lot of glue that needs to dry. These didn't dry very much overnight, so I tried putting them under a ceiling fan in a bright room, and they dried completely after about a day.

Once they are dry, the colors show up best when you hold them to the light, so they make great light-catchers or sun-catchers. We explored the colors using different kinds of light- windows, ceiling lights, the light table, and flashlights.

Creative Kids Summer Class: Colors, Lines, and Shapes

Each day of this year's art play summer class, we focused on a basic element of art: colors, lines, and shapes. I'll do a few more in-depth posts about some of our bigger projects, and will highlight some of the ways that we played with art in this post.

Colors

We read a book about a Black and White Factory, and explored adding colors to these black and white designs, as well as through this fun invitation to create with colored glue. 

We also played a pass-the-art game (similar to musical chairs, except when the music stops you pass your art to the next person and they add onto it). It was the perfect game to try out my new set of Kwik Stix. These little paint sticks are AWESOME. Bright colors, quick drying, and smooth writing. Great for pencil grip practice, too! I just love how these turned out.

Lines

On the second day we thought about lines, and used print making and free drawing to explore making and extending lines. 

We also read a fun book called Ish, and made some ish-inspired drawings with marker and watercolor.

Shapes

On the last day our focus was shapes. We thought about how lines can make shapes, and how we can cut, tear, and arrange shapes to form pictures in art. ---> (My favorite book for exploring shape manipulation is Perfect Square) 

We had a really fun week! Links will be up soon for some of our other projects:

Outdoor Art

Color Factory Art

Wild Color Art

Shape Collage Art

Book Love: If You Ever Want to Bring a Piano to the Beach, DON'T!

I knew this book was going to be perfect for my piano play summer class when I first read the title. I mean, pianos and beaches combined into one silly story? Always funny, but perfect for summer. We loved it!

Connecting Activity: I created a simple piano/beach themed sensory bin to go along with this book. Kinetic sand, sea shells, with foam piano keyboards and musical notes. It could also be fun to "go fishing" for pianos somehow, like she does in the book, using foam pieces, magnets, and string. Lots of fun possibilities! But for this year we enjoyed this little sand bin. Because we'd been learning about the pattern of the piano keyboard, I purposefully made the keyboard pieces with either 2 black keys or 2 white keys, as another way to reinforce that concept. 

Creative Kids Summer Class: Piano Play 2017

We just finished our first session of Creative Kids Summer Class, with our focus topic of the piano. Piano Play is one of my favorite classes to teach, and in the past I've spread out the lessons over 8 (1-hour) class sessions. This year, I condensed and combined many of the topics to fit into 3 (2-hour) class sessions. So it was a little different, but still a lot of fun to spend more time together exploring some basic musical skills and concepts. Here are some of the ways we played with the piano this week!

Exploring Sound

We explored and tried out different kinds of instruments, and made some sound-makers of our own. 

We used water glasses on the light table to explore the sound of different pitches, and created tambourine shakers out of paper plates. 

High and Low Sounds on the Piano

After we spent some time exploring all different kinds of sound, we started talking about differentiating sounds in music and on the piano. We began with listening to and creating high and low sounds. First we tried making them with our voices, and then we discovered how to play higher and lower notes on the piano, using the classic story of the Three Little Bears

We also looked at what high and low looks like on the musical staff as we listened to "The Aquarium" from Carnival of the Animals. In that song, you can hear the notes moving up and down the piano, like fish swimming up and down in the ocean, so we used fish stickers to think about that movement in the music.

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Fast and Slow, Loud and Quiet Sounds

We also thought about how music can sound fast, slow, loud, and quiet. A favorite activity during this topic is painting slow or fast depending on the sounds of the music. 

 We also popped some popcorn for a snack, and paid attention to the sounds of the kernels popping. They start slow and more quiet, and then crescendo into fast, loud popping sounds.

Patterns on the Piano Keyboard

We explored the pattern of the piano keyboard, and tried to find certain notes using that pattern.

 We used the felt piano, and a paper collage activity to try to recreate that pattern as well.

The Musical Alphabet

I like to use a silly story about Grandma's house and a doghouse to teach the names of the piano keys. We played a few games to explore the musical alphabet using the giant floor piano.

Musical Notes

We played with long and short sounding notes on the piano, created our own songs, and built some notes out of our snack food (cheese and carrot sticks).

 Musical Books

This class is full of dancing, singing, and instrument playing, but we also spend time reading fun stories that help us to further explore the concepts we are talking about. 

One of our favorite silly books from the session inspired this piano at the beach sensory bin.

End of the Year

The last few weeks of May were so busy with all of the end of year happenings, and I just now realized that I never blogged about any of it. We talked a lot about movement and change and growing, in addition to celebrating all the things we've learned that we can do in preschool. It was a lot of fun! This last year has been a good learning and growing experience for me also, and I loved working with this group of amazing children. I'll be sad to see some of them move on to Kindergarten, but I'm also so excited for them to have more learning adventures. :)

Thanks for a great year!!