More Preschool Fun

Our letter this week was "B." We decided to glue some beans on our "B" picture. J loved this. He also did very well with it.


After we were all done with our regular school, I let J paint. He was absolutely thrilled. Can't you tell? For those that know me IRL (in real life), you know that I am not big on messes. In fact, it's HARD for me to let the kids do messy things. I'm working on it. Really I am. Photo proof....


Okay, so why the photo of his paint palette? I was VERY impressed by it that's why! This summer took a three day art class with Barry Stebbing from How Great Thou Art. One thing that Mr. Stebbing really stresses is having a clean palette. The children were shown each day how to correctly mix their paint colors in order to keep their palettes clean.


J did not participate in the class. The class is for those five & up and I really didn't think J could sit through a two and a half hour class. However, Mr. Stebbing thought I should attempt the class with J so we did the first day. I'd like to say Mr. Stebbing was right & J was an avid student. However, J was J & while he did sit well that first day, a lot of the information was presented too fast & moved too quickly for him to follow. I did most of his work for him so I opted not to continue the next two days with him.

Having said that, as I mentioned earlier, Mr. Stebbing did show the children each day how to correctly mix colors. I tried to find a video of it, but couldn't find anyone who does it like Mr. Stebbing. So I'm going to try to describe it.

Each child was given a paper plate for a palette & the basic primary colors (red, blue, green, yellow) & white for mixing. To mix a color - let's say we are doing light green. You would take your brush & pull a blob of green off to the side. You would then (without cleaning your brush) take a dab of white & start mixing in to the new blob of green. If you do this correctly, you can have all of your color variations off of your main color without disturbing your main color.

Now go back & check out J's paint palette.

He told me he was going to "mix" colors. He drew out blobs of it & did mix. While he didn't do it as cleanly as someone older, I was still very impressed by this. The art class we took? That was back in July which is at least three "four year old" years I think. ;-)