Craft this week

Ever since Nel was a toddler, I noticed that she loved patterns. If I gave my 2 children a set of furniture for a doll house, Jo would use it creatively to create a story scene, while Nel would arrange the furniture to create unique patterns. That's the main difference between my 2 girls.

I remember vividly how at age 4, Nel kept her books in patterns. Once I found a set of books in her room, arranged to form a large square, with an eraser placed on each book, and a pencil balanced on each eraser in a certain manner. Another time I found her books stacked vertically upwards creating a pyramid.

Since starting art emphasis with my children last month, we've then done several projects which I though she'd enjoy, all to do with patterns and shapes. Here are a few projects we've embarked on.

Project 1 - Creating objects out of beads. Found these cool beads in Toys R Us





Jo made a star using a preset shape


 

Nel used a large board and created her own designs, pendants etc etc. She created this for me. :)
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Project 2 - Using an assortment of sticks, build a house

 

Work in progress, Nel working independently. In between we discussed Math and how it is important in architecture

 Jo frustrated initially when she couldn't get things to stand up right

 

Nel's almost done...well, not really, we ran out of sticks. She's also created her own "marble" floor, but using crayons to create patterns, and then painting over with water colour.

This is Jo's finally standing up with a little mummy's help. Floor was her own design and done by her.

 Then we all worked together to create the roof. We will continue this when I get more sticks.

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Project 3 - Pottery



We went back to Mr Cheah's in Segambut for pottery. You can find his phone number on my other post (pottery/1st visit). I like his classes because I think Mr. Cheah is a very patient teacher, really willing to share and detailed. Just lovely to learn from  him! (highly recommended!)



This is Nel's work today, a teapot. She did it using a potter's wheel and some parts by hand. Quite a good start in my opinion.

This is my boring creation. Let me just say, learning on the potter's wheel ain't easy!!!! I wasted quite a bit of clay while learning to shape this. He also made me do some basic things first, like how to center the clay, get bubbles out of it..make it go up and down etc.  Fun!

As for Jo..Mr. Cheah didn't charge me for her work. She was all over breaking rules..like seeing how fast the potter's wheel could go, or sticking brushes and sticks into clay on a moving wheel to see if it'd fly off and scraping metal on the wheel to produce screechy sounds. Not very good I know. 

Well..that's all for art emphasis month now.