If you follow my blog, you know that we are huge fans of the art projects included in our Mother Goose Time curriculum. Mother Goose Time features two types of art projects: Make and Plays and Invitations to Create. While the Make and Play projects are lots of fun, the Invitations to Create are hands down our favorite – (for a more in-depth description of these check out my past post The Creative Process). I love giving my little one the freedom to create with minimal intervention and seeing the amazing pieces of artwork he makes. Not only is the final product pretty amazing, but observing the child work through the creative process is also so much fun.
When I ‘formally’ started using Mother Goose Time with my youngest son about a year ago, the Invitations to Create were merely opportunities for him to experiment with different art mediums. The artwork he created was always amazing but didn’t necessarily go along with the inspirational photograph/painting. Fast forward to present day and my son has become much more deliberate with the artwork he creates. He makes more of an effort to make his work resemble the inspirational piece of artwork, or ties it into something he learned in our daily lesson. One day this past week we were learning about Mars. We discussed all of the typical things one would discuss when learning about a planet and also discussed the occurrence of sand-storms on the planet. For some reason, this fact stuck out in my son’s head and was apparently still on his mind when we started art time. Our Invitation to Create that day featured a photograph of the planet Mars, some paper, glue, and red sand.
My son went right to work putting glue on the page and then sprinkled sand everywhere. While his artwork in no way resembled the spherical Mars in the inspirational photograph, he explained to me that he was making a sand-storm.
Hearing him connect the information we had discussed earlier in the lesson to the artwork he was doing was such a relief to hear. At least all that babbling on and on about the planet Mars earlier in the day was not in vain.
As a side note, my oldest daughter (10 yrs. old) was on Spring Break this week and loved jumping in and doing the invitations to create alongside her brother. One of the great things about the Invitations to Create is that they are suitable for any age. They allow the participant to use whatever artistic skills they have to make an amazing piece of art. Furthermore, the art is always unique to each person and makes for a really spectacular art display.
Here is a peek at some of our artistic fun from this past week…
As always, if you have any questions or comments, let me know in the comment box below. Join me later this week to see how I store all of our art supplies and what some of our favorite products are. See you soon for more Chaos on the Creek.
Disclaimer: I am so grateful to have found this curriculum and am excited to share our experiences on the blog. In exchange for my unbiased and honest reviews, Mother Goose Time has provided us with the curriculum free of charge.
Chaos on the creek 