Leave-Behind: Art Trays

Ladybug Girl and I love doing art together on weekends, mostly because there are so many types of materials and endless possibilities.  But on weekdays when I have work, I usually come home to the usual crayon drawing that Ladybug Girl did with her yaya.  

Here are some leave-behind trays that worked as an easy way to open her up to other creative ideas besides crayons.  And if you're new here *welcome*, here's why I do them.

These aren't just for Ladybug Girl's creativity, this is also for her fine motor skill practice which we need a lot of.  I had to find activities that were not too difficult to help prevent frustration and unfinished work if I wasn't around to guide her.

Here are some that we've done:

1.  Chalk pastels on a torn-out page from a black coloring book.  She likes the smudging and sensorial feel of it in the hand.

Black coloring pages were found at Book Sale by her uncle.  Chalk Pastels from National Bookstore P200+.

2.  Freestyle dot-painting on a canvas.  The canvas is really just spare cloth and an old picture frame I stapled together (like this).

After the first invitation just got two colors, I took those away and continued to leave the other colors on our shelf as more encouragement to try.  Do-a-dot markers are available in the Philippines on zalora.com

3.  Gluing cotton balls and pompoms.  I love this one because it was one of those spur-of-the-moment experiments that I wasn't sure would be simple and intuitive enough - but it worked.  The idea started from wanting to use the last bit of glue in our supplies, and that became instrumental.

Here's the before and after, done immediately after its shelf-debut.  Notice two subtle tricks that make it leave-behind friendly?

Leave-Behind Trick#1:  leave the bottle upside down for easy flowing glue  when fine-motor is still a challenge.
Leave-Behind Trick #2  leave one obvious example to follow.

I was so thrilled by her accomplishment that I had the idea to extend the fun by flipping it over and making it into a raincloud using pompoms.  

This time I was afraid that white schoolglue would not be strong enough, so out came the tacky glue which we've hardly used because it was too tough to squeeze.  I wasn't sure this would work.  

Leave-Behind Trick #3:  as a 'prompt' I marked out the raindrops with a dot-marker for her to figure out what to do.
Leave-Behind Trick #4:  even Tacky Glue is no match for gravity.  She did this all by herself again!

4.  Price-sticker circles for free-style arrangement.  Mind you, I only drew a circle and left out some yellow and orange stickers from National Bookstore (these are great art materials!).  

  

It also got done so quickly the next day, I didn't even get a "before" picture

She even drew in some detail.  How cute.

Frankly I was shocked and so skeptical that she did this last one all by herself.  My attention-span-challenged daughter?  When just three months ago, this was her idea of art?

Glued marshmallow art done during a play date

But her yaya swears it.  I was joyous.  Were her new Montessori school and our home playful learning helping so much for her to finally concentrate?  Maybe?  So maybe I'll think of another leave-behind sticker art tray to test that out.  Haha.

Some other easy leave-behind ideas for art are in this old post here.

I'm a bit sad not seeing my daughter at play in this post, so I'll leave with how I picture Ladybug Girl doing her playful art while I'm at work.

This little girl melts my heart!