A Little Kindergarten Creativity

I read a post on Mother Load tonight asking for a little creativity help...

so I thought I'd see what my kindergartner and I could do in a few minutes.

Here is what we came up with. 

Zentangle

Yes, it is my go to these days for cheap and easy entertainment.

Yes, you can make them really cool and intricate and gorgeous.

Or, you can get kids started on the project and then have peace in your car/house for a good 30 minutes!

That folks is ART in my book.

Here is what we did.  I took a piece of regular copy paper and tore it into four pieces.  Then I followed the basic guidelines for a beginner Zentangle and we put a dot in each corner and connected the dots.  I love showing this step from the book because you can see that the lines don't have to be perfect!

Lexi kept commenting about what if she messed up.  I love telling her that it's her piece and as long as she likes it, that's all that matters.  The lines don't have to be even and you can color over something and that's okay too.

So after she did the Z step, she decided to write her name in the top section.  I was thinking we would only do her initial, but apparently they have been practicing writing their WHOLE names and so that's what we did! 

The next section went great.  She made half circles all around the page with her pencil and then colored in the dead space in the center with pink.  This pattern went really fast and I thought we had it made!

But then we got to the coloring in section.  She liked doing the little circle things and the dots, and had decided to color in the middle with purple when we hit a wall.  Her hand got tired.  We were about 15 minutes in and she was coloring and decided that this might be too hard. 

So we stopped and went to the last section.  A smaller section.  For this one she chose the little four line design.  Yeah, an easy one.  Her class is really working on patterns right now and this four lines drawn horizontally and then four lines vertically again and again were right up her alley!

After she finished, she went back and finished the purple coloring in and we shot a picture and done!

The whole project took less than 30 minutes and she really enjoyed it.  Granted, this was not new to her, but she had never completed a "project" before.



So here are my two cents for anyone that needs are really cheap and easy project for 6 year olds..

1. Pre-cut paper into a smallish size.
2. Practice this yourself first so that you can explain the steps.
3. Buy the book or print out samples from Zentangle so that each group of students can see examples of the various designs.
4. Decide beforehand if you want these in one color, multiple colors or if you just want to use pencils.  Don't decide on the fly.. you won't have everything you need and someone will cry!
5. If a section gets tough, it's too tedious or you just get stuck, move on and come back later.  Or draw a line across it and break it up.
6. Keep the sections that you want almost completely colored in to a minimum and make those the small sections!\

So good luck and have fun! And thanks Lexi for being my star pupil!

Technique Tuesday on a Wednesday…. a cute goodie basket for a teacher gift!

I saw the cutest little apple basket teacher gift over on a blog and had to try my hand at making this little basket.  Click here for the instructions on making the basket.

As usual, I changed a couple of things up on one of my baskets, but I am posting a picture of the completed basket using the above instructions, except for the handle.  My handle is created out of a hanger like the original blogger’s handle.

Isn’t this so cute!!

 
All supplies are Close To My Heart.

And here is Lexi all excited to take her preschool teacher the gift.  I wanted to wait and go fill the basket with useable classroom goodies, but Lexi was determined that she would take the basket today, so we used a package of  jelly beans as a gift instead :)

My goal is to make these little baskets for Maddie’s teachers as well.  There are fun and pretty simple, so as long as sitting in my craft chair counts as “resting” I am good to go!  I’d like to get these done before I have the baby!

Technique Tuesday: Recycled Magazine Basket

 

Lexi and I created this little basket yesterday out of magazine pages.  She had fun looking for “pretty” pages and then we tore them out, cut them up and wove them into a basket.

The instructions for these cute little baskets can be found here.  Since this blogger has done all of the instruction work, I am not going to repeat them here!!  Here baskets are better, but I did find that you do get better with practice, so we may just see what Maddie can come up with.

For my basket, I trimmed my pages to the full height by 7” wide.  Then cut each page to 3.5” wide by the full height before starting to fold.  My strips were about .5” wide. Finished dimensions are approximately 4.5” x 5.25” x 1.5” tall. If you want higher sides, keep the box more square and that will give you the extra weaving space.

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Last note, while some may not like the staples showing, I like the outside staples.  They look like stitches, so I might take a piece of twill ribbon and glue it to the inside of the box to hide the yucky part of the staple.  But then again, I might not since I am already using the box :)

 

Oh.. and one more thing, don’t you just love the pictures of my hands that Lexi took :) Not bad for a 4 year old!

Technique Tuesday: School Keepsake Files

One day this week while at a friend’s house scrapbooking, I saw wonderful keepsake files that she had created for her girls. 

I knew that this would be a great solution to all of the masterpieces created by my kids that I have no room to store!  So off I went to the store for the supplies and here are the results!!  Yes, Maddie is helping to create her own box.  She is at the age were she not only wants to help, but wants to tell me how to do it!  What am I saying, she has ALWAYS been at that age!!

We created the girls’ names and some of the embellishments on my Pazzle at school.  I really do like that thing, I just forget about having access to it!

If you have a need to store a lot of memorabilia, this is a wonderful project for you!

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A Couple of Sneak Peeks

Here is a sneak peek at the project I created for the next Technique Tuesday post! I finished it this morning so it would be ready for viewing while we are on vacation! 

I hope live writer works and the full post will be available on Tuesday :)

Here is the sneak peek!   Did you notice the other sneak peak?