Little Blue and Little Yellow - Leo Lionni

Today's Creativity Workshop started with a book I didn't plan... a book my student brought to share with my daughters... The Book with No Pictures by the very creative B.J. Novak.

She brought this book, which I'd heard of but never read, and had me read it to her. Then Leah came into the room and was interested in it and so we had Leah read it to Becca while we had snack. And then Becca wanted a chance to do all of the voices so she went upstairs and read it to Natalie!

We repaired and painted the clay rabbit and tiger which we made last week, baked gluten-free dairy-free Easy Almond Thin Cookies, played outside, colored today's leaf in the weather tree (from All Year Round) silver for Frost, and then it was time for the story I had picked!

Little Blue and Little Yellow
by Leo Lionni

Then, inspired by this picture on Pinterest of kids painting with their feet -- and having a BLAST doing it, we did foot painting. We chose the bathroom for this since it has a tile floor and tile walls (thus lending itself to easy clean-up). We carefully covered the floor in towels. This protects the floors and it makes lying down more comfortable. Then we got masking tape and taped a large piece of paper from my long roll of 36 inch wide paper up onto the wall, running from one corner of the bathroom to the other. I gave the girls the three primary colors (washable tempera), two soft 2 inch wide paintbrushes, and three paper bowls. They poured paint into each bowl and painted their own and each other's feet. Lying on their backs, they put their feet up in the air (like a dead beetle) and painted directly onto the paper with their feet. For the secondary colors and brown they had to mix the paint on the paper with their feet. All I heard from the bathroom was giggles... they had such a good time! And then clean up was so easy. Hang feet over the edge of the tub to wash them clean, wash paintbrushes and rinse water jars, and pop all those paint-y towels right into the washing machine.

sometimes washable tempera is a must

After snacking on pieces of our gigantic cookie (since you lift the entire thing out of the pan on your piece of parchment and let it cool, it looks for all the world like one enormous cookie!), we moved on to starting our first knitting project. My student wants to knit a pillow for her sister's doll and so she chose a variegated pink and white 100% cotton yarn, I cast on the desired number of stitches, and she began to knit her first row. We practiced the knitting verse (Under the fence / catch the sheep / back we come / off we leap) and when she got tired we paused the project, re-sanded the tips of her knitting needles, and glued on fresh acorn caps. Then I set the needles into the ball of pink and white yarn so that they would be upright while the glue dried.

I have to confess this... I have been making knitting needles with kids for 10 years. So a long time, right? I used to glue on acorn caps for students and have the hardest time getting the needles to stay in place while the glue was wet. I would try to stick the tips of the needles in between the woven slats of the basket and balance them and try to get them to stay in place. One day long ago it dawned on me to just jab the needles into the ball of yarn which was sitting right there in the handwork basket the whole time.

Wow.

Sometimes I think that just when I get life all figured out, it will be time to die. Am I being morbid or does everyone feel that way???