Toilet Roll Painting

The boys have been asking to paint... a lot... and we ended up painting twice a day sometimes. After a few sessions of open ended painting, I thought it would be good to introduce something new for them to paint with to keep the interest. I looked into my recycle bin for crafting and I saw many toilet rolls. Yes, I have a bin where I keep things that I think can be put to good use to the children's crafts. This has been extremely useful. I used to see a craft, then collect materials and I never get to that craft. So, these days, I just look in my bin and see what I have. It's so much easier.

What You Need:
Toilet Rolls
Paint
Paper

They shouted "circle" while painting

K, can't bear to let go of his car while painting.

Y tried to use the rolls to stamp each other.

The toilet roll became a tunnel for his car to go through.

And K couldn't resist and invited his car to join in the painting.

Chinese Learning - with dots

Chinese is one area that I thought I made the most effort in with the least results. I have been trying my very best to speak to them in Mandarin since birth but their first words were still English and once they became verbal, it was almost impossible to speak to them in Mandarin. I was determined to improve things when I hear the singing accent when they try to speak Mandarin.

Other than trying to speak to them in Mandarin as often as I can, I now try to conduct our activities in Mandarin and do more crafts in the Chinese learning.

On this day, we were revising Chinese numbers 1-4. We did dot painting with cotton swabs on the Chinese characters and they didn't reject the activity like how they reject Chinese books. This is a good start. They normally screamed "No!!!" when they see me with something Chinese, especially Y.

Dot Art with Circle Stickers

Read about Pointillism art in one of the art books the other day and got me very interested in Dots. And that made last week a week of Dots and the first dot related activity we did was just making patterns freely with circle label stickers that are easily available at stationery stores. I got all the sizes available and I like the vibrant colors they come in.

In this activity, they...

• learnt about Big, Medium and Small
• learnt about Colors
• learnt about Shapes.
• counted
• practiced fine motor skills, esp with the small ones!
• made patterns, lots and lots of patterns.
• made trains with circles.

And it was a lot of fun... all under the cost $5 for all the pretty circle stickers.