Creating a Sticky Mess

(25 Months)

One afternoon last week while the kids were busy playing with their rice bucket, I sat beside them and cut out a whole bunch of spring pictures from the Williams Sonoma catalog.  I thought it would be fun to make a spring collage using the pretty pictures and some pastel construction paper.  We haven't used glue or glue sticks yet, so this will make for an interesting art project.

I can't believe I've never done any pasting with the kids.  We do a lot of drawing with crayons, markers, dot markers and chalk.  The house is filled with museum quality finger and brush paintings (yes, I'm a proud mommy).  We've used contact paper to make collages, but we've never used glue.  So, today we tried gluing.

Prior to inviting the kidabunks over to their table, I set out the spring cutouts, the pastel construction paper, two small cups of white school glue and two watercolor paint brushes.  When they came to the table, Wild One said "oooh paint" and Little Miss started naming the objects in the pictures that I cut out (ducks, bunny, eggs, flower).  So far, so good.

Grandpa and I modeled how to put the glue on the back of the picture and then how to pat the picture down onto the construction paper (they knew how to get the glue onto the brush, it's the same technique as painting).  We then just assisted when necessary (as in the time when Little Miss decided to brush some glue into her hair) and let them explore gluing and placing the pictures.

Wild One pasted four pictures and then was "all done".  I felt a bit deflated, I cut out so many pictures and he's done already?  My inside Keith voice told me that "it's not always about me" (that's still a hard concept for me to understand), and I just smiled as Wild One climbed Mt. Grandpa and snuggled himself onto his buddy's lap to watch his sister work at glueing.

Then he hopped on his bike and started scooting himself around the lanai.  Wild One's starting to go really fast on his bike.  He's already almost gliding!

Meanwhile, Little Miss stayed with this gluing activity for a good ten or fifteen minutes.  She worked at carefully painting the glue onto the pictures and gently pat pat patting the pictures onto the pink construction paper.

You can see in the above second picture of Little Miss that she prefers to paint the construction paper with glue and then place the picture on top of the glue.  That's my little girl, she likes to do things her way.

In fact, fast forward to later on this afternoon and Little Miss is busy working on creating a tower out of her stacking cups.  She placed one of the cups out of order (placing too small a cup on one of the lower cups), so I told her that she needs to place the cups in order or else the tower will fall.  Well, once again Little Miss does it her way and proves me wrong.  You can actually see how she reverses the order of the remaining top cups so that they do not topple over.  How is she this smart at 25 months?  We are in SO much trouble.