art
Trash to Treasure: Playtime doesn’t have to be expensive with these ideas!
Sometimes as we struggle to keep kids busy and entertained we too easily look towards new toys and technology as the answer. Knowing which gadgets and toys are the best at keeping a child happy and educationally entertained can be both time consuming and eye popping in costs. The good news is you and your child (or classroom) have plenty of educationally fun activities right under your nose; you just need to know where to look! Providing children with “open-ended materials” enables them to be creative, use their imagination, allows for longer periods of “playtime” and encourages opportunities to engage with other children. Open-ended materials are just that, open-ended! They are materials that may be used for a variety of purposes don’t include complicated instructions or rules. Pape...
Recycled art and found poetry
This is the perfect green activity for a rainy day. Here’s what you do. 1. Get out your recycling. Even better, save really good materials for a few weeks – egg cartons, cardboard boxes, strawberry containers, plastic lids are good. 2. Cut out words from the magazines, advertisements, or newspapers in your recycling. 3. Give the kids the words to arrange into a poem. You might want to try it yourself, it’s fun! (Think artist date a la Julia Cameron.) There are different ways to do found poetry – another way is to look for poetry already written – on the back of a cereal box, in the newspaper – and use entire phrases. More fun, in my opinion, is to take words and arrange, rearrange, and so forth. Create lots of poems, find your favorite and glue onto a background. 4. Decor...
A brush with art colors kids happy
The Denver Art Museum on one of its dozen free days a year is about what you’d expect: wall-to-wall families and happy young faces. The difference between this kids’ scene and many others around town is that here, family fun involves making, or learning about, art. James and Becca Dwyer of Englewood recently visited the museum with their families two weekends in a row. While James, 7, was fiddling with shells matched to artwork in the museum, Becca, 3½, was gluing colors to a drawing of a camel. “Then I’m going to color some black on a teapot,” she explained, not looking up from her work. Here is a sampling of similar family destinations where kids can learn to make art — or simply revel in art- related fun. 1. The Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities The...
