Princess Week: Princesses Paint on Trees?

Friday was our day out, and we had so much fun! We started with a parenting group meetup at Creating Artists for Tomorrow, which was amazing! If you live in the Greenville, SC area and haven't been there, you're really missing out! Then we spent a couple of hours at the library before finally heading home.

Table Time

Creating Artists for Tomorrow is an art education program near our house that offers lots of art classes for different ages and levels. We had never been there before, so I wasn't really sure what to expect. They offer a program called Table Time for children to explore with 4-5 different art activities. M was a little overwhelmed at first because there was so much to choose from, but once she got started she had an amazing time!

Here are some of the activities they had set up:

Painting with Cars

There was a bin filled with different types of toy cars and trucks. They had different sizes and numbers of wheels, and some had different textured treads on the tires. M spent a good amount of time experimenting with the different cars to see what kind of tracks they would make. She also liked mixing the blue and white paint.






Water Table

M probably spent most pf her time inside at the water table. There were just three small cups and a paintbrush, but for some reason she found this fascinating. She spent a long time pouring the water from cup to cup, and trying to trap the water between two cups. Whatever works, right?

Play-doh

We have play-doh out at our house a lot, but this was different because of the cool textured rolling pins, and the fact that they had uncolored play-doh and food coloring to mix your own colors. The rolling pins were the perfect size (I need to get some of these!).

Painting Outside
This was clearly the highlight of the day - painting trees! We went outside to find paint cups, paintbrushes, and jugs of paint. M started with red, and asked if she could paint one of the trees. Sure, why not? Everything in the yard was painted - the house, the trees and bushes, the grass, the steps. It was a child's dream, nothing was off-limits! M was so excited, and it was really cool experience for her to paint on something other than paper. I'd like to try something like this at home (not painting our trees or house... but some kind of nature painting - bark, leaves, sticks.)

 

Other activities not pictured: finger painting with shaving cream and food coloring (M isn't huge on getting her hands messy, so she didn't do this long enough for me to get a picture), painting with golf balls (this looked so cool - dip golf balls in paint and roll them around on paper to make designs - but I couldn't get M interested), and easel painting (we have an easel at home, so M wasn't interested - too many other new things).

We will definitely be back!

Library

I love our library. So does M. I literally have to drag her out when it's time to go! We're planning a Transportation Theme week for next week, so we picked out a bunch of books about cars, trucks, planes, trains and boats. I have a feeling this theme may last for more than one week...

Our library has a children's room with toys, books and puppets in the back of the children's area. They regularly move things around and rotate some of the toys, so I was excited to see a couple of new things on this visit. As soon as we walked in M noticed the Goldilocks and the Three Bears puppets that were stuck on the wall. I never noticed that the wall on one side of the room was actually like a giant felt board! The puppets had velcro on the back so they would stick to the wall - so cool!

I told the story of Goldilocks, and M moved the puppets around as we went (tasting the porridge, sitting in the chairs, laying on the beds).

They also had some different puzzles out on the tables. We have a bunch of nice puzzles at home that M is never interested in, but she loves all of the puzzles at the library. Weird.

She was pretty tired from all of the excitement of the day, and fell asleep in the car.

We wrapped up the day with a pink pig collage to finish P is for Princess week.

Check out all of the other princess activities we did this week: P is for Princess.