Paint, Glue and Cotton Balls

It's a start to the new week, and the start of the Christmas Season.  I love the month of December... not only do we get to learn about the birth of Jesus, the music is great, and I am never without some sort of project to do, art or otherwise.

Today I just set up the easel, with pink paint (I ran out of red and green).  The kids love the easel and as long as I'm nearby it goes pretty smoothly when the littlest people use it.   

"What, I'm painting... just not the paper!"  ;)

"I'm just showing her there are OTHER ways to paint."

Mixing our glue with water colors, then gluing cotton balls onto small stars we found in the drawer.

Little Man carried those sneakers around with him most of the morning.  He only put them down if he wanted to paint, glue or put them on :)

Concentrating on not getting the glue on her fingertips.

Pulling apart the cotton was fun enough for Scamp, but...

She did want to try her hand at the glue.  As you can tell, I had to put the camera down for this part.  I didn't want glue on my nice new camera :)

The cotton, glue and stars were a spur of the moment craft that the girls pulled together as I was going through a drawer for something else.  They found the stars, they found the cotton and asked what they could do with them... so after asking a few questions, they thought some colored glue would work out just right.  

It was an added bonus that they got so many tactile experiences.  The cotton was easily stuck to their fingertips if they got the least bit of glue on them.  Then it became very webby on their fingers and even if they tried to pick it off, the cotton would just tear and spread.  It was fun to watch.  Scamp, however, found just tearing the cotton apart was fun.  She would tear it apart, then drop it in the glue.  When she did her star, she didn't quite understand that the cotton ball was to stay on the star and we would get another one, she didn't want to let hers go.  So she kinda "glue painted" on her star.  My mantra this year... Process over product here for this age, process over product :)