Dropper Painting: A FUN Preschool Activity

What’s more fun than painting? Dropper painting. If your little one has already become a pro at using a paintbrush, why not add in another interesting element? There are many ways to paint, and one that we just discovered at our house is dropper painting.

Most mothers with young children have accrued a fairly large quantity of medicine droppers. We have loads! So, I thought rather than tossing them, we’d have fun painting with them. Below is everything you need to know about dropper painting:

Materials

Droppers, one for each color of paint
Tempera paints
Old containers, I used yogurt cups
Paper, I recommend using a fairly sturdy option – ours was too thin and got a bit wrinkled when it dried!

For each color, mix a tiny little bit of water with the paint so it’s slightly more runny than usual. This makes it easier to draw it up into the dropper.

Teach It!

As a Montessorian, I always teach by example. I showed my little peanut how to get paint with the dropper and drip it onto the page. After one demonstration, he was off and running! The only tricky part seemed to be getting the paint into the dropper. So, I reinforced by telling him to “squeeze” and “let go” with the dropper still in the paint.

What Benefits Are Gained with Dropper Painting?

Your child will develop his or her pincer grip
Your child can learn about color mixing
Your child will enjoy expressing themselves artistically

Pincer what? The pincer grip is the grip we use to hold a pen or pencil. Young children must develop their fine motor skills to be able to execute this grip. Any activities that practice this grip (using the pointer finger, middle finger and thumb) help strengthen your child’s muscles, preparing them to have more control as they begin writing and drawing.

My little peanut used yellow and blue. Towards the end of the activity, he began experimenting with mixing. Now, we’ve done this before, so I got comments like “Lets see what color it makes when we mix blue and yellow!” and then “Look, Mama it’s green!” Children almost always enjoy color mixing I find!

So, what are you waiting for? Get out those old medicine droppers, some paint and make some art!

Here’s my peanut having fun with this activity:

How to Teach Your Child the ABCs and a FREE ABC Book

My little peanut has shown quite a bit of interest in learning his letters at the age of 3 and a half. We’ve pursued his interest by using Nell, which is actually a great app for little ones. I helped create the Montessori based curriculum that the app uses. With this app, Peanut learned the letters in his name and a few others.

We haven’t been very regular about practicing, and I’ve been working more lately so there’s been less time to focus on activities with him. When we do spend time together that doesn’t involve eating, doing chores or going to bed, we usually read books or do a craft.

But, that’s changing because we’re setting aside at least 10 minutes each day to work on his ABC book. What’s an ABC book?

Basically, it’s a book with one page for each letter of the alphabet. On each page, your child can practice tracing the letter. There’s also space for cut-outs or drawings of words that begin with that letter sound.

You can see below I helped peanut draw a monkey and he drew a very faint moon, the circle on the right-hand side of the page. Here you can see he’s starting to trace the “m”s. Yes, he’s a lefty! And that pincer grip is looking pretty good I must say. Go peanut!

Here are some of the important things to know when working on an alphabet book:

Use Phonics

Children learn letters most easily by teaching phonetic sounds. That means instead of teaching letter names like “A” as in play, letter sounds are taught. So the “a” would be taught “aaaa” as in apple.

Each time you get out a new page, look at the letter together. Say the sound. Ask your child to repeat the sound. Then, get started thinking of words that begin with that sound and draw together or look for pictures in a magazine to cut out.

Take Your Time

Don’t expect your little one to learn a new letter every day. You should mix in other letter activities to reinforce each letter. We enjoy drawing with sidewalk chalk, using cardboard letters and using the app, Nell, to practice. There are so many ways to practice! I’ll be posting some more ideas soon.

What Order?

The Montessori curriculum recommends teaching in an order that helps children notice differences between letters. In the traditional alphabet, the letters “b” and “d” are very close together. Also, children aren’t able to form words quickly using this order.

So, I recommend teaching in this order:

a, s, m, e, t, c, o, p, u, d, f, j, g, l, b, i, n, w, r, h, y, q, z, k, v, x

This way, children can quickly form words such as “sam, sat, met, set, mat, cat” within learning 5 or 6 letters. That’s great!

**Note** The book I’ve included goes in alphabetical order, so feel free to print out and mix them up according to the order you prefer.

Some people also choose to begin by teaching a child the letters in their name.

What Font?

I chose basic print for our book. Also notice that I’ve only focused on lowercase. In the Montessori curriculum, children learn lowercase first because the majority of what we read is written with lowercase letters. Learning lowercase is the most efficient way to start to read.

Get Your FREE ABC Book

I made a quick and easy abc book using a great worksheet creator. For our book, I included lots of animals because that’s what peanut likes the best! For other children, consider making changes to tailor to their interests. For example, change the “tiger” to “truck” or “tree”. Just be careful with the vowels because pronunciation of these letters is very important. For example, the letter “i” needs to be the sound you hear when saying “igloo” not “ice”. After learning phonics, kids pick up reading pretty quickly!

Get your FREE copy of our ABC book here!

Happy learning!

A Quiet Book for Aby

When Aby turned 1, I wanted to give her something special. So, I created a small quiet book for her. I wanted it to be simple, but also involve manipulation and textures for her to explore. What I came up with was an easy to fold book that my son also loves. Now they each have one quiet book to take along to church. They keep quite busy with these little books.

The book itself was quite simple to make. I used a pair of pants that I bought second hand, some other felt and cloth scraps I had on hand and a few buttons. I sewed most of it, but used a little bit of hot glue for the pocket on the back and for securing Aby’s name.

The cover is simple with a flower and Aby’s name.

The book opens up into one long panel, as you can see below. It folds over like a letter in 3 sections.

On the back of the book (behind the ocean scene) there’s a pocket where some of the fun movable pieces are kept.

For the first section, the section with flowers, I made a butterfly with jingle bells. The bells are purely for fun. Aby has fun shaking the butterfly and hearing the cheerful sound. The butterfly can enjoy the flowers or hide in the grass.

In this same section, once she improves on her fine motor control, Aby will be able to remove the flowers and place them back on. This is great practice for learning to use buttons! For now, little Peanut is enjoying this feature.

The middle section is really quite simple, although I’d venture to say it’s Aby’s favorite. Hide and seek or peekaboo features for little ones are always fun. I used a broken bird pin that I had, of course I checked it for sharp edges first. The bright colors and novelty of a small metal piece intrigue Aby. I hide the bird and then she finds it.

Finally, the ocean section features seaweed, a star button and a few movable creatures: a turtle and two fish.

So, that’s Aby’s birthday quiet book! I had fun making it and hope you also enjoyed it.

What We Did for Fun Last Night

by Rachel Peachey

One of my weaknesses is arts and crafts. I enjoy the process of creation and making something fun. So, I do what every good mother does. I force it upon my kids. Just kidding – it’s not quite like that. But, it’s a point of connection that we do enjoy together. Lately, whenever I’m feeling disconnected, or like we need some quality mama-son time, I wrack my brains for something fun to create together.

My little peanut is three and a half and quite taken, okay, OBSESSED, with dinosaurs, lizards, snakes and all reptiles existing or extinct. So, we’ve collected quite a bunch of small model toys, dinosaur bone puzzles and models and all sorts of creatures that can be found all around the house. Sometimes I find a little dinosaur in the pila (our big concrete sink) and other times, I’ll admit, I step on them. Ouch! My poor sister in law got a scare the other day because she found a quite realistic rubber snake on the bed when she was here looking after the kids.

So, I decided to do a two for one. We’d keep our house slightly more organized and create a play space by making “homes” for these animals. First, we made a home complete with two volcanoes, and a standing tree for “Big Dinosaur Bones”. Peanut had quite a fun time helping to color and enthusiastically scribbled fire all over the sky. Very cool. That was a few nights ago.

Last night, we made a smaller space for a bunch of homeless reptiles. Peanut wanted them to have a swimming pool. So, we cut off the bottom of a carton of orange juice. We discovered, much to our delight, that we could color on it with crayons – so we drew some fish and colored it blue for the water. The reptiles have been alternating between bathing and drying in the sun since then! Who knew our little crafting activity would turn into a lesson about how cold-blooded animals live?

I love these open-ended crafting projects because there’s always something to be learned. If nothing else, little Peanut works on his fine motor skills and we have a great time connecting together. As a stay at home working mom, sometimes I worry that he’ll always think of me typing away on the computer, rushing to meet a deadline. I am pretty good about keeping my evenings open – but having a special mama-son project always makes these times even more precious.

What did you do for fun last night?