Paint Outside - Jackson Pollock Style!

This post is authored by Anna Reyner, a registered art therapist and licensed marriage and family therapist. Anna is a nationally recognized arts advocate that has conducted over 500 hands-on art workshops for learners of all abilities. Follow Anna’s blog at Art and Creativity in Early Childhood Education.

Special Needs Application:
Jackson Pollock inspires visual and gross motor self expression!

Can't find a place to paint inside? Afraid of staining your carpets and floors? Go outside, and leave your worries behind.! Most parents are afraid to bring paint, clay, and fluid art materials into their homes for fear of creating a mess. But paints and other fluid art materials provide tremendous growth and learning opportunities, beside being lots of fun. Let's face it, there's nothing more enchanting to a child than fresh paint, and lots of it. Paints are wet and colorful, they move, mix and blend together quickly, and they plunge you into a sensory experience. No wonder they're so much fun!

Check out this handy art area I created for my own children along the side of my home. They spent hours here, and while it must have felt like a "real art studio," it was really just the fenced in driveway outside our kitchen. Often I would spread out rolls of fabric or paper and give them BioColor® to squirt on "Jackson Pollock" style. The colors were always brilliant. Sometimes we would drag small tree branches through the BioColor® or sprinkle on glitter and various odds and ends before the paint dried. There was nothing they liked more, and I could see the freedom and joy they felt with this "free-style" painting. By putting the BioColor® in squeeze bottles, I was able to provide some small control over the quantities of paint they used, which gave me a wee bit of comfort. Living in the city of Los Angeles, we have a small yard and not much space. But take my word for it...if anyone can create a home art area while living in LA, you can do it anywhere! Be inspired.

Ocean in a Bottle

This post is authored by Anna Reyner, a registered art therapist and licensed marriage and family therapist. Anna is a nationally recognized arts advocate that has conducted over 500 hands-on art workshops for learners of all abilities. Follow Anna’s blog at Art and Creativity in Early Childhood Eduation.

Special Needs Application:

Visual stimulation encourages scientific thinking.

It's summer again and the perfect time for outdoor activities. Ocean in a Bottle captivates children and leads the way to science discoveries. Simply add Colorations® Liquid Watercolor and BioColor® Shimmer Powder to plain water in any clear plastic bottle. Cap tightly and shake it up vigorously. You'll immediately discover your bottle is full of swirling "oceans" of shimmery colored waves that stay in motion long after you've stopped shaking your bottle.

What's happening here? What principle of science does this exciting project illustrate? Water molecules, or H20, are invisible to the eye. If you shake up a water bottle, the water molecules begin swirling around quickly but you can't see them move because they're invisible to the eye. In this project you are "tagging" the water molecules with color and shimmer powder (a non-toxic micro glitter) which enables you to see the water and how it is set in motion as you shake it up. There is so much to the world around us that we cannot see without a microscope. Welcome to the fascinating world of earth science!