Upcycled Tin Art!

Indian mothers and grandmothers typically share one common trait. They never like to throw things out, especially fancy looking, useless stuff. The common explanation is , 'you never know, they might come in handy someday'. I have never seen the sense in it before, nor do I do now. I mean, I understand recycling, but the idea of stacking stuff in a closet for someday and something to happen is beyond me.

Now in this avatar of mine, where I am this zealous mommy with loads of extra time, I tried it once or twice - stacking things that I have seen being used on Pinterest and stuff. But after a while, it just used to gnaw at my head - the junk! Ultimately I used to just put them all together, and dump them in the trash can. Then I worked some things the other way round. This made more sense to me. At least I am not stacking. I earmark things to do and then when the materials come around, we sit down to create something. I mean there is millions of stuff to do, so nothing is running out exactly, is it?

This craft idea out of tin cans was created in this way. I had stumbled upon an Italian site where there were loads of stuff to do with tin cans. There were mostly farm animals and clocks and pen holders, but I liked the idea of creating an alien. A and I had a new favourite book those days, 'Aliens love underpants'. You can read our review of the book here - Aliens Love Underpants. And it was perfect timing since I knew she would like a follow up craft to the book. 

I got A to paint the tin can with an acrylic colour of her choice and she picked green. Now if you know tin cans, you  know that they can be sharp at the area you cut off the top. My can opener is one which cuts from the inside, so the top is smooth. There is nothing that you need to do on the inside, so it's perfectly safe. If the can is opened such that the top has sharp edges, I wouldn't have gone ahead with this as it is not safe. You will invariably cut your fingers. 

Once the can was painted and dried the next day, we sat to make the eyes, mouth and nose. All from scrap ;-)

I made the eyes with  milk-carton caps and stuck googly eyes on them. For the nose I took a clip from an old clothes hanger that I found lying around in A's drawer - this was A's suggestion. And for the teeth, we took buttons of different sizes. A wanted the eyes to hang from the top, so I attached them to pipe cleaners and fixed one end to the inside of the tin, so that they eyes wobbled on top. Some colourful yarn for the hair, again A's suggestion, and we were done!

Look at our friendly alien :-)

I am particularly happy with this as quite a few of the suggestions came from A. I followed her idea just as she instructed :-) 

Tree of Love for Valentine's

I came across a number of Valentine's Day crafts on Pinterest. A's school got the kids to make a heart out of air drying clay and painted it red. They sent it home to us, after placing a tea light holder in the centre of the heart. 

Though back home, I had never seen anyone involve kids in a Valentine's day celebration; the school's involvement here made me hunt for some crafts. I have a friend in the US, whose 2 sons had to each make 30 valentine day cards for their school mates and some more for their teachers as well. My friend, who chose to make the cards at home, instead of simply buying them from the store, swore that this was her first and last time at it! ;-)

So I thought, why not, let me give it a shot too - at least, I had no such commitments at school, so we made it a home project. I looked up a number of crafts and the 'Valentine Tree' interested me. Though what I saw was a miniature craft, a thin branch of twigs arranged in a small pot and hung with decorations, I ended up making just something else altogether! I wanted to use the tissue paper rolls which we had begun to save up, by default - just in case, a craft caught our fancy! So I set about making my tree from scratch.

I picked up 2 kitchen tissue rolls that are almost double the length of the standard toilet tissue rolls and fixed one on top of another vertically to make the trunk. I then cut a dozen regular tissue rolls to flatten them up. I asked A to colour all of them dark brown with water colours. Once they were dry, A and I drew bold branch shapes on them and I later cut them out. I stuck the branches on either side of the tree trunk so that it resembled a tree. I tried making bark shapes on them with crayons and chalk pastels. This is how the first cut looked -

 

I wanted to jazz it up a bit, but couldn't think of anything, so this is how our tree looked for almost 3-4 days. And then, as I was punching coloured paper one day for some other craft, I had an idea. I picked up 2-3 different green coloured sheets and punched them quite a bit and stuck all the green dots randomly on the tree. I liked the look, here it is - 

For the hearts, I picked up another recycling idea; you would probably laugh if i tell you this! I cut out hearts from plastic milk cartons! Hahaha!! I got this idea from a mommy online who made suncatchers with these - they did not seem like a very bad idea. A and I got to work with doing patterns and decorations on the hearts. We used everything and anything from buttons to felt to foam to beads to stars to even paper! A glimpse - 

All the decorations were done by A with glitter glue and regular glue. I just did the cutting work wherever required! We took about 2 days to dry all our crafts and when they were ready, I punched a hope at the top middle of the hearts and drew red satin strings through them. When everything was ready, we put up the hearts on the tree and the decoration was done!

This is our tree of love - 'Appa, Amma and Me' :-) We presented this to Appa when he came home tired on Valentines' day evening - as expected, it was perfect to brighten up his evening! :-) Followed by a special dinner too! Heart shaped pasta! Yay! :-)

Happy Valentines'..... always! :-)

States of matter

Soild, liquid and gaseous. Yep, the three states that help you see, feel, touch, smell or taste anything. It is a simple concept to teach you rkid, especially with examples around us. I tried to do this at home with water, and it was an easy practical!

Come Sunday morning, and I began by taking some ice cubes in a bowl to show A. She of course, showed more interest to touch them, slip them around, taste and even feel them. I asked her if she knew what ice was made of, and she said water, though she couldn't explain how. I showed her how we can fill water in the ice trays and put them in the freezer and the water solidifies to make ice. And since it is solid, water can take the shape of any container that you freeze it in.

I kept the bowl out near the window sill for the ice to melt and we went out to the park for our weekend afternoon fun. Even after we came back the ice hadn't all melted so I cheated a little; if I let the ice take its own sweet time to melt, my A would have forgotten we were doing an experiment ;-)

So I filled the bowl with some water and invited A to guess what happened to all the ice. This she guessed correctly and told me that the ice melted to water. I explained to her that only when it is really cold, ice can form and when it is not, the ice will begin to melt. I also co-related this to the climate in Antartica, which A knows well because of the recordings of 'Frozen Planet', a BBC series, that we love to watch. I would highly recommend this programme to little kids to get them involved in nature; its an amazing series.

We then moved on to the kitchen, and I set to boil the water. Once the water started boiling, I showed the steam to A. This, I explained to her, is water in its gaseous form. Liquids tend to turn to gas, or evaporate, when exposed to warmer or hot temperatures. This can be co-related for your child with the example of clothes drying or rain-water drying up. 

I couldn't get the picture right, so I fidgeted around with it to give you a decent idea. 

You know you will get this right by default when you do this, so ignore this picture as it doesn't really help!

So we can show our little ones that the same matter can be seen in 3 common states - solid, liquid and gaseous. And most matter on our planet are present in one of these forms. Yes, I know there is plasma out there, but I guess that lesson is another 5 years away - gives me time to read up on it myself ;-)

This is a very basic, simple experiment, but the lesson on science is pretty important. You can actually follow up with this experiment on cloud formation  to show them how the cycle repeats itself in nature to give you rains.

Hope this was interesting! :-) 

Rangoli painting!

Rangoli is a folk art from India in which patterns are created on the floor in living rooms or courtyards using materials such as colored rice, dry flour, colored sand or flower petals. It is usually made during Diwali, Onam, Pongal and other Indian festivals. They are meant to be sacred welcoming areas for the Hindu deities. The ancient symbols have been passed down through the ages, from each generation to the next, keeping both the art form and the tradition alive.

We, who come from south India, call this 'Kolam' and typically is made with wet rice flour by using the tips of your fingers. Though I'm not very good at it, I love the art and indulge in making them during every festival that comes along. These are a couple of traditional everyday 'kolams' that I have done in my London home recently -

The designs are deeply traditional though I tend to take off somewhere in the middle of it with my own doodles ;-) 

This is a rangoli, which is typically characterised with coloured powder - ideally made during important festivals like Diwali or Navratri. I did the borders and some more while A helped me quite a bit with the colouring inside. 

During  Onam, the harvest festival of South India, we make a 'pookalam', which is typically a floral design made totally with flowers. It is a beautiful sight to see! When I moved to the UK, we had just moved into our rented apartment and hence my first Onam here was an unprepared for event. Though I made the traditional feast and we all burped ourselves wholeheartedly, I could not go hunting for flowers for my pookalam. And there was my little A with me, who had to be kept entertained and busy all day. So this time, I hit upon an idea of doing my pookalam with water colours! :-) 

It turned out to be a great idea because though it took me as much time as it would have taken me to make a regular rangoli or one with flowers, it kept my girl happily busy! I did the border colours and madam helped me with the complete colouring! :-)   Here is how it looked:-)

I drew out the basic rangoli with wet chalk and asked A to begin her colouring. Once she was done colouring the whole rangoli inside, we took a lunch break while it dried. Turned out, that was a good idea, because the dried colour was quite pale. We both together gave a richer second coat to the rangoli and when that dried, it looked great. I did the borders with contrast colours and jazzed it up with a few English posies! :-) 

Not bad, don't you think?  :-) 

Quite the contrary - Sink or Float?

This is amongst the earliest and the simplest experiments that you can try with kids - even 2 year olds! Unlike my other experiments, this doesn't involve colours, but involves water, which is again a crowd puller ;-)

The experiment basically introduces the kids to weights, buoyancy, density. Though these words don't really have to be put across to the kids, what they do understand is objects float when they are light and sink if they are heavy. The fun part of the experiment is you can send your kid on a hunt around the house to look around for tiny objects to use in the experiment - they could be just about anything. The more, the merrier! Secondly, before you drop any object in the water, you can let your child guess what would happen and why. If you want to make it a little more of a scientific project with an older child, you can actually take a paper and pen and record your observations!

We first took a large bowl and filled it with water. I then placed 2 smaller empty bowls on either side and put cards next to each of them that said 'SINK' and 'FLOAT' respectively.

I then arranged all the items that A and I had hunted for around the house for dunking  in the water for this activity.

As you can see, we picked stuff like an earring to a balloon to balls to erasers; we even took spoons of wood, plastic and steel.A tiny glass bottle, a straw, a grape - like I said, just about anything is okay. I was careful to not take any object that would absorb - I decided that could be a separate experiment; I did not want to confuse her with that learning here. 

One by one, we started dropping the objects in the water. Before she dropped it in the water, A would take a guess at what would happen, whether it would sink or float. 

The confusion for A came in when we put 2 little balls together - one was plastic and one was a bouncy ball - the plastic one floated and the other sank. She just couldn't explain how and my husband and I had a nice laugh at her amazement. 

As adults, it is very easy for us to explain this phenomena. But for kids who associate things with big and small, it is tough for them to understand why a small grape would sink to the bottom and a huge, plastic capsicum toy would float! 

There was some learning for us too - a pistachio shell, which we thought would float, actually sank! 

A also noticed the refraction of light on this hanger, how it looks bigger inside the water than outside. 

Once all observations were made and the idea was explained, I asked A to pick out the stuff from the water and sort them in the respective bowls. 

We noticed that A was still a little confused, especially with objects that are bigger in size, but lighter. It became a game with us in the coming days, where we would look at or hold  different objects and try to guess if it would sink or float in water. 

And when the experiment time was over, we let A play with objects and the water by herself for a while. She  was at it for a while and when the entire table area was flooded, it was time for me to play bad mommy and end the revelry! 

Pebble painting

For someone who hails from India, some things are just taken for granted. Sandy beaches are among them. Most places you decide to holiday in, there will be surely a rendezvous with the sun and the sand. Making sand-castles, wearing graffiti glares and sexy swimwear, soaking in the sun, writing names and drawing in the sand - its all there! 

And cut to UK. Beaches, huh? Naah. Even if you find them, you can't get into the water, they are freezing cold all through the year. Sand? Oh no, you don't even have those most of the times! Who would have imagined you need to adjust to that! Most beaches are the pebble beach kinds and there are extremely few sandy beaches. So, it is quite a dull proposition to holiday on a beach here. No sand, no dunking in the water. :-(

Now since we have to make peace with this situation, we went about collecting pebbles on the one beach that we had been to, which thankfully was also a sandy one! We picked up a whole bag of flat pebbles and brought them home, as usual, not knowing what to do with them. And one day, we sat to colour them in metallic paint.

They looked really nice, but we din know again what to do with them. Then, one day filled with boredom, we sat to draw on them. We did not use any water colours or a paint brush though, we used indelible marker pens.  I had a go first, and this is the random stuff that I came up with -

On the back side, this is what A did -

Can you recognise her hedgehog? :-)

We bought a new book in our library, called Peter's Pebbles, where the boy in the story loved to paint different animals and birds on his pebbles. You can read our review of the book here, in my other blog dedicated to Children's picture books- My Tiny Caterpillar. Interestingly, the book is my entry for the alphabet today on the A to Z Blogging Challenge.

We took inspiration from the book and decided to do some animals of our own and some scenic pictures too!

The elephant and the crocodile (the green thing with bloody jaws, LoL )  are A's creation! :-) The others, I'm not even going to bother telling you, it wouldn't matter because you anyway can't make them out from my laughable drawings!

I also attempted a zebra! Check out my traditional Tamil 'kolam'  and A's picture of a sunny day out!

Its a fun activity and I'm sure a very popular one too. Next time, do pick up flat, shapely pebbles for your little one when you see them lying around on a beach! 

Occasion cards -Gift them!

A very enjoyable and interesting way to gift cards to your family and your child's friends is to let your child make them herself! A child as young as 3 years can manage a small sized card if she loves to doodle or draw and colour. If your child is old enough to understand the occasion, say for example Dad's birthday or Christmas, then it adds a lot more excitement! 

In India, the system of structured education starts so early (as early as 3+ years) that the responsibility of nurturing creative exploits or even introducing them as a hobby falls wholly on the parent or caretakers at home. For someone as hare-brained as me in matters of hobbying or creative skills, this is quite a daunting task (again, I thank all the brilliant moms all over the web who share their lovely ideas). Faced with the pressure of keeping up with the schoolwork, creativity naturally takes a backseat.

Here in the UK, it is completely the opposite. Formal education does not start before 5 years of age. I am not really a big fan of that; I find it really sad that even a little amount of time is not scheduled in the nursery for learning about certain basic concepts. I think a kind of breakthrough is achieved by the new age schools in India which happily blend the old with the new and manage a balance between the two cultures.

After coming to the UK, a very big idea that I have learnt to appreciate is the importance given to children to explore and develop a sense of individual creativity. The children in the UK have a lot of time to explore pursuits of their own, with active involvement of parents, guardians or even carers at day care. This could be anything, and everything, from exploring colours and textures, nature trails, exploring science activities, crafts and hobbies and what not. And all this is completely unstructured - again something new for me, as I am only exposed to the culture of sending off your child to numerous activity classes to learn everything that is not taught at school. Needless to say, I was captivated. This blog, and all the activities in it, stems from that fascination and the sheer joy of spending precious time with my little one exploring such pursuits. 

So then, we come to this activity of making greeting cards. I would like to tell you that this is a no-brainer, really. Anyone can think of this and it is very satisfying as well. But many among us won't do it because, frankly, when we think of a gifting a card, we think of a beautiful one. One that doesn't have smudges or clumsy figures or sloppy colouring and writing. I have been there too. A year back, when my child would say she's drawing a cat, I would actually try to teach her easy ways to try to draw one, because that's probably how we have grown up. We need to see something resembling the perfect image in our head, on the paper. Personally speaking, and thankfully for my child, I've come a long way from there. Now I don't interfere in her drawing or colouring or sketching or whatever. I'll give you a small example of what this creativity is, that I am talking about.

A brought this home one day from her nursery and her carers had put up a note at the corner of the sheet saying that this is a picture of a sea, as A had made it. She put the glue and picked the embellishments herself and put them randomly on the sheet. It is not a sea to you and me, but then, it could well be the sea, can it not? A was smiling shyly as she showed it to me, because it was HER creation.  This is what I am talking about. I have never seen any such sheet from playschool, summer camp, nursery or activity centre where A went to in Bombay. The sheets there always used to be structured, perfect, beautiful. I'm not trying to be critical here; of course that is good too. But my point is I started appreciating this way of respecting the tiny ones' preferences and thoughts. 

Anyway, I guess I'm digressing. So come Christmas, birthdays, I used to ask A if she would like to draw a picture or a card to gift. If she said yes, which was usually the case, we went about creating those. I also help her with her projects sometimes, but most of the stuff is hers totally. I'm attaching a few beauties here ;-) 

This was an X'mas card that we made for a very dear friend. Santa's beard was done by painting white on A's palm and printing it on the card. Her drawing inside shows her happily jumping on the grass with her younger friend.

Another X'mas card we made for a friend was using A's foot print for the Xmas tree trunk and her hands for the branches and leaves.

A also made a small drawing of her playing in the rain with her friend, who is shown having long hair, and her younger brother.

We made this card for Appa's birthday, again using A's palm and fingers and colouring them cleverly to show a 3 layered cake and candles on top :-)

She made those smileys herself and insisted on writing 'dearest Appa' so that Appa would know that he is indeed her dearest person in the whole world! :-)

We made this birthday card for a friend by using various stamps and colouring them and using finger painting to make flowers. I made the rainbow with glitter glue and A painted the colours.

And this A made at school for Mother's day this time :-) 

That's her picture of me! :-) Haha! Beautiful, ain't I?