It seems to be that no matter what great plans I have for a big activity at the weekends, when I am off and have most time, they never come to fruition. Today, I had thought of doing some big messy play activities, however the day didn't pan out that way, and so I decided to do a smaller activity instead.Today we used the rest of our sticky back plastic, or 'contact paper', to make a tissue paper butterfly collage.
While Simon and Isabelle tore up the tissue paper into small pieces, I used a Sharpie to draw a butterfly onto the non-sticky side of the contact paper. Then Simon and I double teamed it, and managed to get the butterfly stuck to the patio door and remove the backing paper. That left us with a butterfly shape and the sticky side of the contact paper facing out. My drawing obviously isn't too bad, as Isabelle was able to recognize the butterfly shape and say the word, as well as show us the sign,
Isabelle remembered that the contact paper is for sticking things to, and although Simon offered to show her what to do, she started straight away by herself. She stuck around 10 pieces onto the butterfly before deciding she wanted to peel them off again. So off they came, and then she did the same again - stuck some on and then took them off. That goes against my nature very much
- when you start an activity it should progress! This was going forwards and backwards, forwards and backwards. As Simon reminded me, however, she is 19 months old and she was having fun - so what was the problem?
By doing this activity on the patio door while it was sunny outside, the light shone through the tissue paper and meant that any overlaps showed as a different shade/colour. We chatted about colours and the overlap of the pieces of tissue paper and how that changed the colours.
She stuck the pieces of tissue paper on and took them off for a while, before deciding that the paper was much more fun to play with by itself. She took the pieces of paper out of her tray and moved them to Simon, then would go and collect them and move them back again. She played doing that for as long as she had sticking the paper on, and seemed to really enjoy the feel of the tissue paper as she would crumple it and rub it in her hands.
Meanwhile, I continued to stick pieces of the tissue paper onto the butterfly to finish it off, before cutting the whole shape out to display on our art wall.
