Mixed Medium: Yarn & Oil Pastels Art Activity

During summer camp this year, our students learned how to use oil pastels by coloring and blending with a blending tool. We offered card stock and encouraged our students to get creative with their designs.

Afterward, in small groups, I poured tacky glue on each child's art work and gave them a paint brush to spread out the glue. Tacky glue has this way of brightening up colors, creating a glossy surface once it dries. I offered colorful yarn cut at 3 inches or so for my students to add to the abstract art by creating curvy and straight lines on top of their colorings.

After the artwork dried, we presented the artwork on a larger piece of card stock to offer a frame to the artwork and voila!

This activity worked out very nicely in small groups with kids ages three through five years old. They had a lot of fun with the process and they were very proud with the finished product.

Thanks for stopping in and I hope you got some ideas for your own projects!


Angelique Bowman

City Art: Craft Activity by Kids

City Art Project Taught to Ages 3 through 6

The summer program has begun at Wonderland Arts, here in Durham, NC.  While we art teachers love to focus on art, especially while school is out and summer is here, it is also important that we continue to teach global education to our kids.  That said, after a fun lesson on cities around the world, I thought that building our own cities would be a creative way for the lesson to sink in.

The Process:
I had lots of pre-cut shapes that I cut from craft paper to offer the little ones who are still learning to cut, and each child could paste them on a sheet of construction paper however they wished.  But first, I gave a quick demo to the kids to give some ideas on what to do with the shapes.   My students were given markers and crayons as they were free to draw whatever they wanted.  They could also use scissors to cut up extra craft paper if preferred.  I offered to draw a vertical line on the construction paper to represent the ground, like a straight horizon line near the bottom of the paper, for kids wanted help determining where the ground was.  Others could draw their own with rulers.

Some children based their cities off of specific cities that we learned about, while others invented their own cities.  They all got really involved and felt really proud of their original artwork.  We displayed each city side by side for everyone's eyes to enjoy during the week.

Creating craft paper cities is a fun way to encourage kids to be original.  

Thanks for visiting!  Feel free to email me about signing your child up for our summer program at Wonderland Arts.

~Angelique Buman