Fine Motor Skills

At Purple Twig we offer art classes for children starting at age 2. I love working with this age because the importance of how things look is a rare occurrence. This age is far more interested in the exploration of the materials, how they feel. We offer a lot of materials at this age, from sensory materials like shaving cream to tools like scissors for them to practice with.

We offer clay for sculpting, wood for building, brayers for rolling, pipettes for squeezing. The list goes on and on. Parents and children work together, talking about the color and shape of materials given and the possibilities of the materials.

 As the children come into the studio we have an invitation set out for them to explore before our story and larger art project. These invitation materials are ones that are readily available and focus on practicing prewriting mark making or their fine motor skills. Parents sometimes email me with questions about what materials can be offered to this young age, so I thought I'd share with you all a few great projects you can do with kids age 2 and 3.

TAPE AND SCISSORS

This is a great introduction to using scissors. Having them peel those little colorful tapes is great fine motor skill practice and the snipping of the tape is so rewarding. They can make recalling long strips or little tiny strips. After they peel the tape, I recommend the adult to hold the tape between two hands for the child to cut.

The tape rolls in themselves can be rolled or stacked as well. 

Your little artist can place the tape on the paper wherever they like, using them as stickers or use them as a line in a drawing, making letters or a simple shape. 

PAPER COLLAGE

I save all those extra bit of paper left over from other paper projects.  I spread them out on the table and have a pair of scissors waiting for each child.  This project offers a great opportunity to talk about shape and color with your child as well as help them with fine motor skills. Some children use two hands when using the scissors at first and some go right to using one hand. Even if they don't use them correctly, its great to introduce them to this common tool.

After they explore the scissors for a bit, I give them a glue stick and a piece of paper to glue start choosing shapes and colors to glue down.

BEADING

A cupcake tin is a perfect container to offer beads and cut straws and buttons along with pipe cleaners. The pipe cleaner is so much easier than string and it can be manipulated itself.

Sometimes also offer small pieces of foam that I punch holes into as well. This project allows for discussions of color and size and shape of each of the materials as they choose what to string onto the pipe cleaner.

I hope you give these creative activities a try. Let me know how it goes if you do. I always love to hear what you all think. 

Citrus Ornaments

Wow! November absolutely passed me by without getting a chance to write a post. Now that we have finished up our Fall Classes at the studio and before getting ready for our Winter Camps and Classes, I have a chance to take a breath. What do I like to do when I am taking a breath? Make things at home. I have been dying fabrics for Holiday gifts, baking cookies and making granola and making new ornaments for the tree.  I love a handmade Christmas.

Our family has made a lot of ornaments over the years. Our tree is now filled with ones from Christmas past. We have ornaments made form pinecones, ones made from wood and ones made from tin. This year we went with what was growing on our trees in the yard. Winter is the season for citrus. Our trees are full of oranges, lemons and grapefruit. I am not sure of the history of the dried citrus to decorate the holiday tree. If anyone knows please reach out and let me know. The different fruits dry up in different colors. The lemons turn dark almost blood red, while the oranges are a deep orange. The ruby grapefruit become a deep pink.

When drying the different fruits, I cooked them separately because they dried at different speeds.  This one is with a white grapefruit.  I sliced the grapefruit as thin as I could and placed them onto a baking sheet.

My oven's temperature does not set lower than 250 Fahrenheit and this works better with an oven heated to 200 degrees. I put them in the warm oven for 45 minutes at 250 then turning them over and turning off the oven, leaving the citrus in  for another 45 minutes until they are dried. Just keep checking on them.

As you can see a few are over cooked and some are perfect on the same sheet. Oh well. 

When cooled, I punctured holes near the top and used fishing twine to hang them up,  but you can use ribbon or string, depending on the look your are going for.

The light shines through them and gives off such a warm glow. 

This one is the ruby grapefruit.  

I've hung them on the tree and hung them on on our wreaths. I love the combination of the deep green from the tree and the orange from the fruit.  You could also create a garland and use them to decorate the presents along with a little tag.

Spider Houses

This project was made in our Bug's Life Class for ages 3-4. Making a spider house was perfect for both the theme of the class and for a spooky Halloween project.  When creating projects for kids, I like to offer many different materials and techniques to layer together. 

We started with wood scrap blocks. You can find scraps at lumber yards and probably online somewhere. I have a chop saw so I cut up scraps in shapes I like or need for the kids. I gave each child a rectangle and a triangle, but you don't need to be this literal. A house can be shaped in many ways. I also gave each child some glue and a brush to spread it on.

While the glue is drying on the wood we start to browse through magazines. For this project I tried to find animal or nature magazines to cut out. This girl wanted a bat house so she cut out a few images of bats to use.

We waited for the glue to dry before starting the next step, but if your child is up for it, you could start the next part. If working in a classroom with many kids, I would wait until the sculptures are dry. I bought short flat-head nails to make it easier for the kids to hit with a hammer. I gave them as many nails as they wanted. Some nailed in just 3 and where finished and some really took advantage of the opportunity to use a tool and hammered in up to 15. 

 Then came the web part. I offered many different colors of yarn both bright and dark for them to wrap around the nails to make a spider web. We did talk about who spider webs are all kinds of shapes, big, round and intricate or small and huddled into a corner.

Each child had their own idea of what kind of house, bat or dog or forest or garden type and took delight in the choices they were allowed to make as to hammering and which color of yarn.

Building Sculptures

These sculptures were made in our Toddler Class  but this is a great project for ages 2-6.  

I usually get my wood scraps from a furniture maker. She has so much extra wood and is happy to donate it to the studio for the kids to explore. I did invest in a chop saw and cut all the wood into even smaller pieces for the kids, but you can also get scraps from lumber stores.
I also offered the children puzzle pieces, buttons, beads and colored rice (which I dye myself. If you would like the recipe please email me at info@purpletwig.com and I will send it to you)

I gave each child 4 or 5 pieces of wood and some glue. I used the regular school glue instead of the washable kind for this project so everything really stuck. The children stacked the wood how they liked, sometimes a child might put a large piece on top of a thin piece and witnessed it become unstable and fall. We talked about how to create a strong structure by putting the thicker pieces on the bottom and smaller on the top. 

Then came the puzzle pieces to add. Then the buttons were next sometimes organizing them by color or shape and sometimes the larger buttons would drip down the sculpture along with the glue.

Then I gave them beads and lastly I offered them the colored rice to sprinkle.

The result are these individual colorful sculptures full of texture.  This would be a wonderful project for a birthday celebration or for a nice afternoon one on one with your child. 

Arts Collective After School

Once a month the school yard at Mt Washington Elementary turns into an arts collective. Timmy Ringsmuth has created an incredible after school program in this tucked away neighborhood where children get to a chance to experience screen printing and working with circuit blocks, making books and more. This month I was honored to be asked to create a project for 100 children for this innovative after school program. 

I love the challenge of coming up with a new project for this many children of a variety of ages. I also love the chance to take a project out of the studio to see so many kids really attack the materials with such enthusiasm and concentration. I needed to bring a project that needed little direction from me to create, a project that used techniques they already knew and had command of. That way they were sure to be successful in illustrating their ideas with the materials given. I offered the kids wooden pieces and magazine images to build a conceptual city. Most of the images I brought were of cities, medieval and modern, natural images from lily ponds to forests to animals. Oh and some underwater images as well. 

Since this age already knows how to cut and glue and just needed a little guidance with the sanding of the wood to make it smooth, they could be left to their own devices and discuss amongst themselves what they were building. This kind of independence to create is so importance for problem solving and creative thinking. 

Both the variety of shapes of wood, as well as the variety of the images, created an environment where  kids could explore their own ideas of building and layering concepts onto an otherwise inert material. They built tall cities, short small cities, urban cities, doughnut cities, seaside cities, desert cities, forest cities, castle cities and so much more.