Happy New Year from the Lunchtime Literacy Class at Fishtown Community Library! We spent the morning on snow watch, reading books about snow days, building snowmen, and hot chocolate. Alas, the skies remained clear, so we will have to resort to spoons under the pillow, flushing ice down the toilet, and eating ice cream before bed. In the meantime, we breathed new life into shredded documents and built indoor snowmen out of paper. This delightfully simple art project doubled as a sensory experience — the children ran their fingers through the shredded paper and grabbed fistfulls at a time, bunching it up to make “snowballs.”
This three-year old took great pride in being able to squeeze the bottle of white glue without help and with no restraint. Contrary to the usual rule about glue — “use a dot, not a lot” — more glue was better for this project so the shredded paper could fully adhere to the paper plates underneath.
Sometimes, it can be liberating for young children to embrace the mess in an art project. They can immerse in the tactile experience and enjoy the feeling of overdoing it — using heaps of shredded paper, drizzling gobs of glue, allowing paper to spill over the edges of the artwork. After all, process is far more important than result to a toddler or preschooler. When the mess actually yields a cute piece of art for mom to hang in the window, then it’s a bonus.