Dinosaur Tracks Painting

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For Father's Day our mom group went to a local kids' art studio where they came up with a bunch of fun crafts for the kids to do.  One of them was a toy truck painting on a shirt or apron to give to the dads for Father's Day.  It was similar to this project.  As a spin off of that, Avery did a dinosaur track painting (she is very into dinosaurs right now so I knew she would love it).  It was really simple to do, we gathered all of her plastic dinosaurs and put out paper plates with paint on them.  She them had a great time walking her dinosaurs across the paper and seeing the tracks they left behind.  It turned out really cute and she had a great time!

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Olympic Poster Inspired Art

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Source: Mirror

Have you seen this Olympic Poster yet?  I ran across the image on Pinterest and as soon as I saw it I knew it was something Avery and I could use for inspiration for some Olympic artwork.  


I set out some paper plates with cups on them and let her go to work stamping some Olympic circles onto the paper (I only had 4 cups so we went back after we were done with green, red, yellow, and blue and added the black).  

I love how the picture turned out and she is so proud of it.  She showed it off to her daddy as soon as he got home from work!  


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Another Messy Play Date

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Although messy play can be a lot of work and stressful for parents, there are so many benefits for children.  It helps children develop hand eye coordination and fine motor skills.  It allows children to learn through their senses and explore a variety of new and different materials.  It gives children the opportunity to explore and manipulate materials on their own.  It is process driven and gives children the opportunity to use their creativity and imagination.  


We had our 2nd Messy Play Date this week and once again we had so much fun!  Here is what we had out for the kids to explore:

Avery loves water beads so we went all out with them.  I bought a 1 pound bag of clear water beads plus 3 half ounce bags of colored water beads (I got them in purple, green, and blue). I put the clear water beads in the swimming pool the night before and added 5 red Crayloa Color Bath Dropz.  We threw in some varying clear containers (coffee creamer bottle, tennis ball container, clear bowls, and baby food container).  

We loved making mud cupcakes in our mud pit and I had an extra bag of top soil from our first messy play date so I decided to make a mud kitchen.  We had some spoons, measuring cups, measuring spoons, bowls, muffin tin, pie pans, and cake pans.  I also added a container of flowers to use to decorate their creations (picture is from before I put the flowers out).  

Another favorite taken to a larger scale...cloud dough. The kids used ice cream scoops, a muffin pan, ice cream bowls, spoons, and little silicon bowls to play with the cloud dough.

I found a fun recipe for rainbow slime and thought the kids would love it!  It turned out different than I thought it would but it was great.  

I thought our garden sensory tub would go along nicely with the mud kitchen.  

I saw this fun Barnyard Sensory Station and thought it would be a good one for our group.  I bought a 50 pound bag of clean whole corn from Orscheln and added in some of our farm themed toys plus a couple bowls.  

Avery is really into bubbles lately so I thought we could do a couple of different stations that involved bubbles.  The first was a basic bubble blowing station.  We used my mom's tried and true bubble recipe (1 part Joy Dish Soap, 15 parts Distilled Water, .25 parts White Karo Syrup) and then couple bubble wands.

Bubble Painting was the next bubble related station.  We had a bunch of Crayola Outdoor Colored Bubbles that were the focus of this station.  I also added some spray bottles with water and liquid watercolor since the kids loved them so much as our first messy play date.  The canvas was a full size white sheet that I safety pinned over our monkey bars.

This was the bubble mixing station.  I filled one of our water tables with water and added in some baby shampoo.  The kids used a bunch of whisks and an egg beater to make bubbles.  

 Once again we had our kid wash for clean up...

...and a water table.

Since it was so hot out I also added a swimming pool full of sponges as an additional clean up station and as a way to stay cool.  I made a bunch of blue and yellow ice cubes in a variety of shapes and put them in a cooler right next to the pool.  We used the blue ones first and when we were done with those I got out the yellow ones.  The kids loved playing with the ice and they thought it was really cool when the water turned from blue to green when the yellow ice was added.  

We had quite a few more stations this time around than the first but we also had a lot more kids, the first one we had six and this time we had 12 kids.  

I didn't do as good a job taking pictures of the kids exploring as I did last time but it was a lot busier!!  Hopefully you get the basic idea!  The two favorites were by far the water bead and the mud kitchen.  The least favorite was the bubble painting.  The bubbles didn't work to well, they just kind of bounced off the sheet and didn't really pop the way I had hoped.  Overall though, another successful messy play date.  I'm hoping to get one more in before summer is over!


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Fizzing Sidewalk Paint

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I came across a post on Kids Activities Blog about Fizzing Sidewalk Paint and I knew we just had to try it.  We put ours in squeeze bottles since Avery loves using them.  It was a little thick so we had to go back and add some water to thin it out a little.  


Here's the recipe:

1 small box of baking soda

1/2 cup of cornstarch

Hot Water until desired consistency is reached

Food coloring

Eventually she decided to take the top off the bottle and just pour it.  She loved watching it run down the driveway!  Then it was time to get out the spray bottle of vinegar.  

She had so much fun making the paint fizz!  And like with the paint, the lid came off and she just started pouring it.  One of her favorite things was standing on the paint and having me spray her feet so she could feel it fizz and bubble.  She kept saying it tickled!  


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