It's raining, it's raining again (and again)

Since it looks very likely that most people in the UK will experience at least 3 rainy days this week here are 3 rainy day ideas for you to try. I'll follow them up will full posts on each one soon.

Make a map

M loved this as she's a bit pirates and treasure map obsessed at the moment, although soon enough it became a map of Hong Kong apparently! Tape a piece of paper to the floor, start with some basic shapes to represent mountains, roads, lakes, rivers etc and then get out crayons, felt tips, collage, glue, paint etc add play mobil people or similar! This map stayed on our kitchen floor as a play mat for over a week, and kept M and P busy while we cooked. Lots more great map making ideas if you follow the link here

Draw things in Jars
Containing objects often helps you draw them. We had lots of things we'd collected from the beach and walks so we put them into 3 different jars and drew them using sticks dipped into drawing ink but you could use something less messy! I drew a template for M to draw round to draw the jars - you could find an image online of a jar and use that to make a template. It might be nice to draw onto colour paper with black pen or equally draw in colour. Have a look on my pinterest for more drawing ideas.

Make a pop-up book
This is better for older children, pre-school and up. It can be as simple or as complex as you like. You can find loads of pop up tips on line and on pinterest etc. It's definitely something I'd do again, M really liked it. I've been collecting making book ideas ready for our next story!

Painting, Printing, Stamping

Just a bit of painting, printing and stamping fun from a couple of weeks ago....

After taping some paper to the kitchen floor we started off by mixing colours (being an art teacher this is a bit of an obsession - teaching children to mix colours and not just use the ones straight out of the tube!) We put 6 paper plates down and squeezed Red, Blue and Yellow onto three of them and then put a plate in between each one an I got M to take a bit of paint from the plate either side and mix them up and to guess what colour it would make.

The paper plates worked well as there was lots of room to mix the paint and later on for pressing stamps into too. Not very environmentally friendly though, you could use plastic ones and wash them - would buying plastic ones be more or less environmentally friendly than throwing away paper ones?!....Anyway....

Next we used various things we found in the kitchen to use as stamps. We made patterns, built up pictures and generally just played around with different shapes and colours. The baby even joined in and was quite fascinated by the whole thing. Another idea I've seen is to use nuts and bolts as stamps, but that will have to wait until the baby has a nap as she'd been keen to eat them!

M came up with lots of ideas of things we could use, and then suggested doing some printing. We did some before Christmas to make cards and she really enjoyed it. We used a bit of acetate I had to do some mono printing - I love monoprinting and will definitely be doing some more of it with M, it's great for all ages. If you're not sure what it is have a look on Pinterest, here's an example I found. 

We just painted onto the acetate and then turned it over onto the paper and used a roller to print the drawing.

We also made our own stamps using foam stickers and wooden blocks, I've seen a few ideas for this too and it works really well.

The final thing we tried was stenciling using some plastic stencils which we had.

We got pretty messy and had to have a bath afterwards!

I must buy some ready mix paint rather than using acrylics, which I like but they are a bit of a pain to wash off.

Once the painting we had made had dried we cut it up to use for thank you cards