Tall Tales and Art Summer 2015 (Day 6)

Last day of class today!

The book for today was The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt. 

Activity 1 was an abstract activity using crayon shavings and glue. The children used crayon sharpeners to get crayon shavings in their chosen colors. Some stuck with very specific colors and others went for it and used them all! They placed the crayon shavings into ziplock bags and then added glue to the bag. After zipping the bag closed, they mixed the glue and shavings together. This helped the color from the crayons bleed into the glue.

A corner of the bag was snipped and the glue was piped onto a piece of paper (like an icing bag). Most created a very abstract piece of art, others wrote their names.

Activity 2 was a crayon monogram. Each child received a small canvas (8x10) and all of the crayons that they needed. 2 class packs of crayons were purchased, but we only used 1. The crayons were glued onto the canvas to form their initial.

Activity 3- Melted crayon art. For this one, I purchased small black canvases (8x10) and the students used construction paper crayons. We had the children glue pieces of crayons onto the canvases with tacky glue. Once they had placed the crayons where they wanted them, the parents helped them use a blow dryer to melt the crayons. We glued the crayons first so no little fingers would get burned. We did have an issue with blowing fuses in the museum. I guess the electrical system did not appreciate the fact that we had 10 blow dryers going all at once.

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Tall Tales and Art- Summer 2015 (Day 5)

Yesterday's class was cancelled due to Tropical Storm Bill. Our district was shut down as a precaution, as they were expecting us to get hit with a lot of rain, wind and flooding here in Houston.

So skip forward to today's class. The turnout was pretty low. There was still a lot of rain in the area, but overall, we weren't hit nearly as bad as we were Memorial Day weekend.

Today's book was Dinosaurs Love Underpants by Claire Freedman.

We had 3 dinosaur activities for the children to do with their parents:

Activity 1:  Dinosaur watercolors

The students created a wet-on-wet background using liquid watercolors and water. They used dinosaur templates (not usually my cup of tea, but for a program like this, the parents are much more comfortable with them) to trace the dinosaurs onto black construction paper. These were then cut out and glued onto the watercolor background.

Activity 2: Dinosaur egg bath bombs

The children mixed baking soda and food coloring together in a bowl, until the baking soda had taken on the color they wanted. Once they had the color they wanted, they added about 1-2 tbsp of citric acid to the mixture and stirred it really well. The oil was added at the end to create a paste that could be molded around a small plastic dinosaur. The eggs were placed into ziplock bags to take home, where they can sit for the rest of the day to harden. Once the egg is hard, they can be placed in a tub of water. The eggs will start to foam and dissolve, "hatching" the dinosaur.

Activity 3: Volcanoes/lava lamps

The children were asked to bring an empty water bottle with them. We had pitchers of water on the table and they filled the bottle 1/3 full with plain water. Red food coloring was added (they made the red as bright as they wanted... I had bought a large bottle, so we had plenty) to the water. Then vegetable oil was added to the water (1/3 bottle). The bottles were left to sit for a couple of minutes so that the water and oil could separate. Once it was separated, the parents added broken up pieces of Alka Seltzer to the bottles. This caused the red water to start bubbling into the vegetable oil, creating the effect of the volano.

****Note- Since Alka Seltzer has aspirin in it, I made sure that the children did not handle this. The parents were in charge of adding the Alka Seltzer to the bottles.

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