Today, Arya and I decided to try some new ways of playing with some old favorites.

Ever since her birthday, we’ve been painting with watercolors, and this morning, I introduced a way to change it up. We took a sheet of watercolor paper and some crayons and drew on the paper before we started painting.

She loved it!

While Arya loves to color and paint in her various coloring books and pages, she loves coloring and painting over the things we draw even more.

For example, one of her favorite things to do at her Dry Erase Board is to tell me something she wants me to draw. Then, she colors over whatever it is that I drew. Some of her current favorites include Monsters Inc characters, Cloud Guy from Trolls, and members of our family. Sometimes, I’ll take the time and do a more detailed drawing that’s worthy of my college art school days. However, she’s perfectly ok with strategically colored stick-ish figured drawings. She doesn’t need some gallery worthy portraits of her favorite characters. She’s just excited to see me drawing things that are familiar to her.

Just look at that face!

This is something almost any parent can do. You don’t need to be an artist to draw things for your kids to color. Stick figures are even better than coloring books for most young kids simply because you are the one that drew it for them.

Anyway, side tangent. I’m very passionate about parents of all skill levels drawing/painting/etc. with their kids. (among doing other things with them of course, lol)

This afternoon, Arya decided she wanted to play with playdough. However, she didn’t take out her playdough crate. Instead she brought her toy food over and saw what happened when she pressed the different food into the playdough.

She was very excited to see that if you pressed the plastic strawberry into the dough from different angles, different patterns appeared. She also like that the corn on the cob was shaped like a dough roller. She was disappointed that the broccoli didn’t do much, but the waffle made an excellent knife if turned on its side.

Since we were playing with the plastic food, it slowly evolved into a little tea party when she brought her tea cups over. Her favorite thing to do during tea parties is put the various food that fits into her tea cups in each, and that’s what flavor tea it is. Her favorite would probably be “broccoli tea” which I don’t even want to think about as an actual tea. I like tea, and I like broccoli (cooked or raw). However, I really can’t imagine broccoli would taste good as a tea.

I could be wrong though…

Later on, I pulled out a package of clothespins because we are planning on creating an area to hang up our art. Naturally, Arya wanted to play with the clothespins, so she’d take them off of the paper, and I’d put them back on. Once she got bored with that, we took the watercolors back out and had fun painting the clothespins different colors.

We had fun. I made a cool gradient one from light blue to dark blue to purple. (you can kind of see it in the first picture of this post)

We’re both enjoying figuring out what you can do with watercolors, and how they work. I haven’t really had a chance to explore this particular art medium in years, so I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoy using watercolors as well when we’re painting together.

Anyway, I got my lovely husband to hang up some cord (because he’s much taller than me), and we now have a lovely little art wall for us to hang Arya’s artwork.

Arya now gets so excited when we finish another piece of art. She’ll tell me, “Wall!” because she wants me to hang it up there for everyone to see. I just love that our playroom/homeschool room is shaping up more and more. Once we get a few more things set up, I’ll probably do a little room tour to show you guys.