Summer Camp At Home: Fun With Art!

I hope you’ve been enjoying following along in our summer camp at home series!  This summer, I’ve teamed up with 13 other amazing bloggers to bring you a 7-week series of “Summer Camp at Home”.   Over the past few weeks, we’ve been bringing you two different themes per week filled with different books to read, yummy snacks to eat/prepare and 20 budget activities to do with your kids and tweens.  This week we have two new themes to present: health and fitness and art!  I’ll post the link to the health and fitness theme at the end of this post once it’s available.

Like most toddlers and preschoolers, my kids love creating art!  They enjoy regular, everyday art like painting, and coloring with markers, crayons and chalk, but we always have the most fun when we’re doing a cool art project, exploring unusual substances (shaving cream, melted wax, food coloring), and using creative techniques (sponge painting, smoosh painting and stamp painting) to make our art.

Since I’m crafty and creative, we have countless materials and tools right in our own home to create art with; materials and tools that allow my kids to explore, create and learn in ways that they can’t with just a box of crayons or markers.  With art, it also helps to have a love of art and a willingness to get messy!

Fun With Art: Snacks!
Art, math and science also happen in the kitchen!  Try out some of these creative art-inspired snack ideas with your kids this week.

Pictured from left to right:
Fruity Frozen Yogurt Snacks from Tablespoon
Paintbrush Rice Krispie Treats from Catch My Party
Artist Palette Cupcakes from Jen Loves Kev
Patriotic Pretzel Sticks from Everyday Savvy

The kids and I enjoyed some yummy non-GMO snacks courtesy of Fresh Kids!  We had popcorn, cheese puffs and pretzel sticks.  With the 4th of July holiday coming up, we’re going to try decorating our pretzel sticks with red, white and blue like the picture shown above.

Fun With Art: Books!
We chose 4 fun books to go along with our art theme: Kenya’s Art, Swatch: The Girl Who Loved Color, Mix It Up and Grandma In Blue with Red Hat.

Swatch: The Girl Who Loved Color – I fell in love with both the story and the illustrations.  Rich language is used throughout so it’s perfect for kids learning new words.  It’s also filled with bright and vibrant eye-catching colors.

Mix It Up – One thing I love about Hervé Tullet is his ability to call upon a child imagination while still getting kids to interact with books.  I think it’s genius!  Adults like myself, can’t can’t help but play along with his invitations to rub colors, close pages, and even place your hand flat on an image. Then flip the page and see the results of your action.  So fun!  This book is all about making different color combinations.  By pretending to mix two different colors together to make a new color, kids are bound to retain more color mixing knowledge than just reading about the color combinations.

Kenya’s Art – After seeing a museum exhibit called “Recycle! Reuse! Make Art!” featuring every-day items turned into colorful displays, little Kenya learns about the importance of recycling and how you can reuse things to create beautiful works of art.  A cute book to teach little readers about environmentalism, art, creativity or recycling.

Grandma In Blue with Red Hat – When a young boy learns about what makes art special—sometimes it’s beautiful, sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it tells a story—he realizes that these same characteristics are what make his grandmother special, too. As a result, he finds the inspiration to create his own masterpiece that’s one of a kind.

Fun With Art: Craft Projects!
Since we recently started growing our own garden, I decided to let the kids try painting with different fruits and vegetables.  We ended up using apples, oranges, broccoli and celery.  Printmaking/painting with fruits and veggies is simple!  Simply dip a fruit or vegetable in one color of paint, making sure that the bottom is evenly-coated with paint. Press the fruit or vegetable firmly on your paper.  That’s it!  You can even combine the fruits and vegetable prints to create a pretty pictures like flower gardens.

When using cabbage, it print looks just like a rose!  Broccoli makes sponge-like prints that are great for making trees and corn can produce some really interesting patterns as well.

Now that we’ve explored making prints with fruits and vegetables, I’m looking forward to doing this again with cucumbers and carrots that we grow in our own little garden at home.  Check out what our garden looks like only after 8 days…progress!  Thanks to Fresh Kids for supplying us with a Snack Happy Box which included our snacks and an awesome garden kit!

Here are some other fun art projects for you and your little campers to explore this week:

Make Washable Spray Chalk Paint! via Growing a Jeweled Rose
Crumpled Paper Art via Buggy and Buddy
Patriotic Hand Print Craft via b-Inspired Mama

Below are the 14 themes for this year’s 7 Week Summer Camp at Home Series. Please click on each link for all the ideas as each blog post goes live.  Be sure to check back each week to see the new ideas the next set of “camp counselors” suggest for the upcoming week ahead.

We hope you enjoy this series as much as we enjoy putting it together!  Happy Camping!

Your turn: How are you and your kids spending your summer?  Feel free to share in the comments.