Tape Resist Watercolor Trees - with Salt Effect

I was inspired by this to try a completely different type of art project with the children yesterday. It turned out beautifully.

As I believe I've mentioned before, I have very little art experience. I've never really worked with watercolors myself, but one of my aunts gave us some really nice watercolor paper and I had bought some watercolors for other projects (like the salt art). I found a roll of my husband's tape (I think it's electrical tape) that I thought would peel back off the paper well. We also have salt. So we had everything we needed to try this.

This is how we did the project.

Gather materials.

• watercolor paper
• tape
• watercolors (I chose blue and red because I wanted to start by having the children paint everything blue and then add a little red to the blue to make a darker blue to layer over half the picture. I wanted a wintry look to the picture.)
• paintbrushes / cup
• salt (table or coarse)
• easel (optional)

I prepared the trees with the tape ahead of time and taped them to the easel. Then I let the children wet the paper with a fine mist from a spray bottle.

Next I gave them the paint and had them paint the entire card blue. I had to show them that it was all right to actually paint over the tape and to paint all the way to the edges of the watercolor paper. Then I added some red to the blue watercolor paint. I was aiming for purple, but ended up with a dark blue instead. I told them to re-paint the bottom half of their paper with the darker color. (I picked the bottom because the paint kept dripping down. If we had tried to make the top darker, we would have ended up with drips all over the bottom. An interesting effect, I'm sure, but not what I wanted.)

We took the wet pictures down from the easel and laid them flat on a large piece of cardstock and the children sprinkled salt on their pictures.

We let them dry with the salt in place for an hour or two. Every so often we'd stop by and observe how the salt was turning blue and there was a snowflake effect in the salt around the paint. Then we sat down to brush the salt off.

Finally we pulled off the tape.

The children were amazed and proud at the final product. I have to admit, I was pretty impressed too. I think the end result is quite beautiful and it was simple enough to do with a 2 and 4 year old.

I think we'll do a similar project in the near future, except this time I'll let the children apply the tape any way they'd like and choose their own colors.

Ava's new room

This past week we've significantly rearranged Ava's room. Her room is small, and the children would rarely play in there because the room felt cramped. She did, however, have one of those long shallow closets with sliding doors. We came up with the idea of taking the doors off and moving her toddler bed into the closet.

Well, it gave us more space, but it looked awful.

So, I decided that we could try hanging curtains around it to hide the storage and edges of the closet. We went to a fabric store and chose some material and got 10 yards of two different types. One was pink and satiny and the other was a tutu type material (not sure what it was called actually) with pretty sparkles. I just hemmed all the edges and we called them curtains.

We bought and installed a curtain rod and then tossed the curtains up and it's better. Ava loves it. Now it does look like a pink princess went a little overboard in her room, but I can live with it. (Ok, that made it sound easy, but I am obviously completely uneducated on how to hang curtains, because achieving that look was extremely difficult and my husband did most of the work.)

This is what her room looks like now. Everyone is enjoying the refresh and I've noticed the children spending a lot more time playing in there.

It's Coming and I Don't Have a Good Feeling About It

Our evaluation by the school district is coming up in a little over two weeks. Thursday they will send someone to observe her at school. Then two weeks later I bring her in for a morning of testing. I just don't think she'll qualify for further services.

She's doing so well. The occupational therapy has been nothing short of a miracle. She's trying new foods, tolerating stimulating environments, touching a wide variety of things without too much protest, and playing more with others. It is amazing and I am in awe at the transformative powers of occupational therapy. I'm not sure she needs much more OT.

Her speech is still full of errors, but her language is fine. Her teacher is just an amazing teacher and has a lot of experience with little ones and so doesn't have a lot of trouble understanding her at school. Most of what she has to say at school has a lot of context to help out. Her intelligibility is aided by her good coping skills. She will often try another way when her first attempt at communicating is unsuccessful. She also has good inflection, facial expressions and body language which helps boost her intelligibility. All of that is wonderful, but is going to work against her during this assessment. I suspect they will not qualify a child who isn't even three yet based on the presence of speech errors alone.

We'll just go and see what happens. But I'm not getting my hopes up.