Collage and a shiny fish

Fancy a calming activity?

We did.

We always encouraged to continue the theme from preschool at home. The preschool sends home some fun play activity suggestions.  He had it in mind he wanted to paint a fish. Today he had in mind exactly what he wanted to do , “shiny fish”.

With his older brother home, like most families the play activity has to be modified because the other family member wants to join in.  We did a lot of talking about which way the shiny fish was going? What was the shiny fishes name? and where he lived?

I decided to extend the painting to include some collage work. He was in a fiddgety frame of mind and loved the tearing aspect.

Sometimes you just have to adapt or adjust your play activity. I loved that today I could think on my feet and go with the flow. It doesn’t always happen like that. Then we abandon the activity and do something else.

1. Send kids on a wild chase around the house to collect 3-5 magazines each. ( My kids know where the stash of magazines are they are allowed to rip out and use) This also has the bonus of using up some of that extra energy. I can continue with setup.
2. Cover area with newspaper.
3. Draw animal- MO -Fish BG-Duck.
4. Talk about colours of the water. Establish colours. We choose green and blue.
5. Find pages with these colours on. I did a lot of the finding as they got distracted with the magazines.
6. Make piles of the colours.
7. Tear the coloured piles into little pieces. Not too small.
8. Choose your glue. We experimented with stick glue and white glue. Each boy chose something different. The point was to get it on so I didn’t fuss over which was better today.
9. The boys pretty much got the pattern of  choose a colour,Tear glue stick. until they had finished a row or area.
10. I helped the MO keep on target.

What we could have done was

• have had some music playing
• I could have read them a fishy story

…but it was actually calming to sit with the boys and tear out pages. We did have some funny conversations about the giant shiny fish and the fat duck.

Shiny fish

This is the part the MO wanted so badly to do. Corn syrup + food colouring = shiny fish. We used a plastic container we could throw away. He painted the fish with the mix. It was very wet and took a while. You have to let it dry right there unless you’re using heavy card otherwise the weight of the mix will go through. The next day, it will have dried. It’ll be shiny and a little tacky but after a few days it’s just shiny.

How did it work out?

I loved this activity. It was great for both their moods that day. We’d had a hectic morning and this activity was great for all of us. They got to be creative and see their water appearing.

The MO got to painting the shiny fish for a long time. It took  4 days for it to dry without it being tacky. It doesn’t have to take that long. He wanted to paint and I didn’t stop him.

The BG was happier making his sea and liked how his duck stood out.

He’s still not painted his duck. His brother did comment that it was naked but the BG has stood his ground.

We’d definitely do this activity again.

Have you tried collage? Would you do it this way? Any tips for us for next time?