We are thinking happy thoughts and wishing that it was sunny, so today we made a hand sun.
Materials: yellow/orange paper and acrylic paint, drop cloth or something to cover your table, pencil, sharpie, crayons, paint brush (I like the foam ones), several paper plates, scissors, and cup of water.
Directions:
1. Cover your table and put paint on one paper plate to act as a palate.
2. Show your child how to dip the paintbrush in water, then dip the paintbrush lightly in the paint, then paint some streaks on the back of one paper plate (their sun).
3. Then let your child try to do some painting. Encourage them to paint their entire sun.
4. While the sun is drying, trace your child's hands with a pencil. He might also enjoy trying to trace your hands. We traced eight hands.
5. Cut out the hands. While I cut them out, my son did a little sorting activity.
6. After the sun was dry, I taped the hands to the back of the sun to create some rays.
Now we're just watching the weather and hoping that our little hand sun can work some magic and make the real sun come out!!
Comments:
My little guy was more excited about mixing the paint and dipping the paintbrush in water than actually painting the paper plate... so this activity took a lot longer than I planned. Next time I would pre-mix a little water on the plate and not teach him how to dip the paintbrush in water. I was surprised at how much he LOVED getting his hands traced and tracing my hands. He rarely sits that still. We would definitely do this activity again!
Language Development:
My son loves the sun and moon and talks about them all the time and loves to point them out. The vocabulary words I introduced with this activity were: sun, ray, hand, trace, paint, mix, dip, and brush. While we painted the paper plate, we talked about different brush strokes and I demonstrated how to dab and also how to make long streaks with the paint. We also talked about fingers and hands and counted the fingers as we traced them. Once the hands were added to the sun, we pointed out all the sun's rays and counted how many rays we had (eight hands... we didn't count all the fingers as rays because that would've been too overwhelming for my little guy). If you have older kids, you could count all the fingers. We also talked about colors as we painted. My little guy liked labeling the paints by saying "orange," "yellow," "mix."
We got this Handmade Sun idea from NoTimeForFlashcards and she includes a fun song about the sun that you could sing with your child as you do this activity.
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