Year ago when I worked in day care, I had a little dream of creating a huge coloring wall, or spreading a long line of butcher paper across the floor for my future child to go crazy coloring on. I thought it would be so fun for a little kid to be given such space to create!
This isn't a totally new idea in my blog, as I talked about vertical work several months ago, but we only did Crayon coloring on one wall and stickers on another. This time I gave Ty markers, colored pencils, finger crayons, stickers and stamps and let him go nuts! If I had a bigger open wall area to hand more paper I would make the coloring space much larger! This seemed to be plenty for him to work with right now.
He hit the stamps first, which proved to be a bit of a challenge at first. They are regular scrap booking stamps, and though he does fine with them on a table, it took a little work and figuring to adjust his wrist and grip to work vertically. He was a stamping machine once he figured it out!
He really went wild with the markers! So much space to move his arm around and make big marks!
I had put his finger crayons away a couple weeks after his birthday (August) as he just didn't seem all that interested in using them after a while (or any crayon for that matter). I thought it may have been a total birthday gift fail by me. I tried again here and he now adores them! I can't believe how much coloring he did at once time with these. He had filled up so much of the paper by the end!
I put some seasonal stickers (from my stash of old address labels and stickers that I get from March of Dimes) on the edge of the wall for him to use as well.
All ready for him to stop by and create again after nap! I did end up flipping the paper though so he had a "new" canvas to work with as he didn't show a ton of interest in the lower half.
Have fun!
What a great idea! My little guy hates to sit and colour....I wonder if he'd prefer it this way! Thanks for sharing! :)
ReplyDeleteDon't know if you have a pottery barn nearby, but they have a wonderful easel that is very affordable. Might save your wall ;-)
ReplyDeleteMy son is now 2 1/2 and I used the montessori station concept. However, family gifts make keeping the "stations" extremely difficult! How do you deal with incorporating gifts into his Montessori lifestyle?
Sorry for how long th is took me to get to! Thanks to you both!
ReplyDeleteBrooke, thanks for the easel suggestion! Ty does have one that we use at times, but I also love to give him a huge space to color on, and thankfully he's great about not straying from the paper! If he did I guess it would be a good practical life lesson to wash the wall, huh?! :)
As far as gifts, I have a huge Amazon Wishlist for Tyler that I point people to when they ask what he may want or like. I also say that he loves books so you can't go too wrong with that. People generally know that we live a bit of a "different" lifestyle and they ask or just send him gift certificates or money. If you have a gift that doesn't really suit what you want for your child, you can consider putting it up to use in those moments when your kiddo is cranky or clingy and you desperately need to do something for a few moments and no other activities will work. I've done that in the past with a couple noisy, push-button toys when I needed to! I used to keep them up in our hall closet in case of emergency and it always worked great! Hope that helps.