Messy Monday # 18 - Farm Week

How's your summer going?  Have you been participating in the themes for Messy Monday?  I hope you are enjoying the direction that a theme can give your week.  I love the connections that my kids make when we concentrate on a theme for the whole week.  There's a chance to go further in-depth and to remember what we've learned because we build on it all week long.  

This week's theme is Farms - this can go a zillion different ways, but we started as we always do, with building a little library based on our theme.  We pulled from our own collection and went to the library to pick out some great storybooks and resource books for the week and made up our sight word cards of new vocabulary words.  We visited a farm, picked some fresh fruit and veggies and talked about how farms are how we get food on our table.  We  also made a pie with some of our goodies.   Animals were the highlight of our Farm Week - but drawing animals can be difficult for littles.  I try to keep frustrations to a minimum, so I decided to do a little lesson in finger and thumbprint animals.  Super fun and a great success!

We made finger and thumbprint farms - inspired by Ed Emberley.  If you don't have these books, I highly recommend them - I also love his how-to drawing books - these are great resources to have in your bag of tricks.

This is what one of the pages looks like - check out the great step-by-step explanation:

You'll need a couple supplies to get started - ink pads (you can use watercolor or tempera paint too - just wet your finger and put directly in the watercolor or put a dab of tempera paint on a paper plate and dip fingers and thumbs), paper- white and construction, crayons, black fine tip pens  for adding details, watercolor paint for painting the sky, and glue for gluing down construction paper shapes.

Make up a finger/thumb wiper with a wet paper towel on a plate - it'll save a lot of trips to the bathroom.

We started by making different farm animal colors along the bottom of a piece of paper with our finger and thumb prints.

Next we added simple shapes with a fine tip black marker to turn them into farm animals.

We added shapes with construction paper for the farm buildings.
(this is my example/sample)
Filled in with crayons for grass and other farm-y details.

Added a little watercolor for the sky and there you have a simple finger/thumbprint farm.

I'm linking this up to some great parties this week, check them out!