Tall Painting

Supplies Required:
Wooden blocks (2 or 3 square blocks stacked on top of each other, or tall wooden blocks if you can find them)
Acrylic paints
A big piece of paper or cut up paper bag or something else to set the blocks on top of to catch the paint

The idea for this art project came from anothr website, which for the life of me I can't remember the name of.  If I do, I will pass it along--it has lots of fun art project and other creative ideas.  I bought all of the supplies I  needed at Michael's. I am on their e-mail list, so I get coupons e-mailed to me every week.  They often have 30% and 40% off coupons.  I used one of those coupons to buy the wooden  blocks.  I found the perfect blocks for this project in the unfinished wood section of the store.  The tall blocks came in a package of three, and they were for whittling.  They were pretty pricey (I think it may have been $7.00 or $8.00) but with a good coupon, it wasn't a bad deal at all.  I managed to find acrylic paints that were on clearance (they had a bunch of different colors on clearance when I was there) so I got the paints for $0.29 and $0.49 a piece.  All in all, the project ended up being just under $5.00.

This is a fun (but very messy) project that I think would appeal to kids of varying ages.  I easily could have done this project with E when she was 2, or maybe even 18 months (if I thought I could have kept the mess at least somewhat under control).  Basically,  you set the block (or blocks, if you have smaller blocks stacked on top of each other) on a large piece of paper or something else that will catch paint spills.  Then, let your child pick a paint color and squeeze paint over the top of the block so that it runs down the sides.  Keep doing this with different colors until the block is covered.  It creates a neat effect (although ours didn't turn out quite as well as the one I saw on the website I got the idea from), and it was fun for E to be able to squeeze out paint.  Of course, that's also one of the downsides of the project, that it does use up quite a bit of paint!  After E was finished "painting" the block, we took smaller pieces of paper and made prints out of the paint that had dripped onto the big piece of paper.  We basically just set the paper face down in the paint, and then picked it up and set it somewhere to dry.  (If you skip the print-making, this project is not QUITE as messy.) 

I should give one warning about this project:  Do not attempt it on 5 hours of sleep, as I did.  Paint somehow ended up on the carpet (probably because I idiotically had E do the project on her little white table that is in our living room rather than having her do it in the kitchen) and cleaning paint off the carpet is an especially frustrating task when you are exhausted!  Of course, the carpet in our living room is already a huge disaster, so it was really not a big deal.  (Stay tuned for the "painting carpet" project we will no doubt engage in some day right before we get new carpet or new laminate flooring.)
This project would be a great activity to do in the driveway on a nice day.  (We did this project in the evening after I got off work, making doing it outside an impossibility.  See the gorgeous green backdrop out the window, one of the reasons I fell in love with our house?  That also means lots of mosquitos on summer evenings!)

Bean Box

Advanced Preparation Required:  Yes
Supplies Required:
Dry beans
Scoops or other containers
Box (cardboard or plastic)
Bowl (optional)

There is a kids' play place nearby that we take E and W to.  The play place has a table that is filled with dry rice and toys.  E has literally spent 45 minutes at a time playing with the rice table.  So a few months before her brother W was born, E's grandmother and I made her a bean box.  We bought a plastic box from Target (I tried to look for something that was deep enough, but not too big so we wouldn't need to buy tons and tons of beans for it) and then bought several bags of dry beans.  Here is a picture of the box to get an idea of the depth of it:

We filled the box halfway full of beans, and then put measuring cups inside that I had purchased from the dollar store.  We picked out a variety of different beans, which made it more colorful.  E loved the bean box from the first time she played with it.  She loved scooping the beans with the cups, transferring them from the box to a bowl, and later, she started burying things (such as Little People) in the beans and then digging them out.  Sometimes she would bury things in the beans and have me find them, or vice versa.  I like the bean box much better than if we had done a rice box.  Rice is cheaper, but it is MUCH harder to clean up because the pieces are so little.  Although this project is on the pricier size (due to having to buy several bags of beans), the cost can be reduced by using a cardboard box instead of buying one.  E has gotten hours and hours of fun out of her bean box.  When we are in the car, E sometimes pretends to call Grandma or Grandpa (I play Grandma or Grandpa).  Almost every time, when I ask her what she did that day, she says "I played with my bean box."  (Even though she hasn't.)  So even when it's not being used, it's being talked about.