OEA - bean mosaics/collage

We're still on the mosaics, and you can check out what everyone else did here. (The button has changed and looks complicated so I'm waiting to be sure how it works before using it).

After I showed Froglet how to fill in a drawing he decided to do a flower (we sometimes make flowers with smarties so he knows about that already). He got frustrated with trying to get the petals in a nice circle - here is the conversation that ensued:

M: It's much easier if you start in the middle with flowers.
F: That is how God made them.
(...)
M: Those are borlotti beans.
F: Autumn beans, because it's turning to start to be autumn and the leaves are turning brown. This is a long long sonneblueme [sunflower].
(...)
F: Puddles and long grass and raindrops raindrops raindrops, and a long sonneblueme and some leaves that have fallen down. And lentils.

And the result:



On the left is the one his comments above refer to. The second one also has a sunflower and a rainbow (which he got me to draw for him). The small white beans are raindrops.

I should have used split peas because then I could have made pea soup. Any good recipes using dried beans? Will they germinate if I plant them?

OEA - paper mosaics/collage

Last weeks Open ended Art topic was paper. You can see what everyone else did by clicking on the button (which I forgot to include in last weeks post, oops):

We started off by playing a bit with a tangram.

Froglet wasn't quite sure what to do with it but we had fun making a goose together and then putting its head in different positions. Next I gave him some tangram shapes and some circles (in case he wanted to do a vehicle of some sort) and let him loose with the sticky backed plastic.

The top one is actually upside down. He told me he was doing a road (while he was doing it - the bit that actually looks like a mosaic), but afterwards he said it was all nothing.

As you can probably see, we covered it with cling-film afterwards. This turned out to be fun too as owing to Mummy's lack of skill, there were lots of air bubbles which were great to pop, like bubble wrap.

This weeks theme is going to be beans.

Open Ended Art - pebble mosaics

I've fallen behind on posting these even though we have been doing them diligently.

First off, this months theme over at Teaching My Little Bookworm is mosaics. And this weeks material was pebbles.

For some reason pebbles seem to be in short supply over here. Maybe I just don't know where to look - beaches are sandy and river beds are inaccessible. So Froglet and I made our own pebbles. We used white clay, various small items to print with, sand, dried herbs and marker pens to colour them in. This was our first time using real clay and we had a great time! Froglet's pebbles ended up relatively flat (not very pebble-like) but that was all part of the fun.

Then when they had been baked, cooled and coloured, we made mosaics using playdough as a background. I know this only barely qualifies as Art, as it's not permanent, but I thought we might enjoy doing it again on a future occasion. And besides, I'm running out of storage space to keep permanent sculptures!


Froglet tells me that his mosaics are dinosaurs mouths with lots of teeth. He also discovered that the pebbles leave a nice pattern in the dough when they are removed.

I have more OEA photos to post from previous occasions but not time to do it in right now so it will have to be another post.