I try to do an easy craft or artsy project during each day's homeschool lesson. This one was especially fun for Grace (because it was really messy, just to give you fair warning) and used up some supplies we had lying around.
We worked a lot of different materials into this particular project, incorporating fine motor skills practice as well as painting practice, sorting, and grouping.
Bird Seed
At the beginning of the summer, Grace and Joe decided to make a bird feeder. Joe bought the smallest bag of bird seed he could find (which was also the cheapest and the least liked by our birds), a whopping 10 pounds.
I'm still skeptical about that huge bag of bird seed, but that's another story.
Anyway, I have been looking for projects to make using bird seed since we about 9.85 pounds just sitting around.
Bird Seed Painting
Materials
- Watercolor paper (because it's really substantial)
- A pencil
- Watercolors or other paints (even markers or crayons would work)
- Glue or Mod Podge
- Old bird seed
Instructions
- Start out by having your kiddo draw a fall scene with a pencil. I told Grace to draw some fall trees. According to Grace, she drew an evergreen, and two trees with colored leaves.
- Paint the picture.
If I was painting a fall scene, I would use reds, oranges, and yellows, but I was not painting this particular fall scene. I kept my opinions to myself.
(That's important, by the way. Let your artist paint her picture however she wants to. Purple trees? Super imagination!) - Set the painting aside to dry and look at the bird seed.
I poured some into a bowl and helped Grace to sort it into different kinds. There were black sunflower seeds, round brown seeds, and round yellow seeds. Grace tired of sorting very quickly, and then she mixed the piles all back together again. (Another thing I would have liked to do differently, but it wasn't my project.) - Smear puddles of glue wherever you want the bird seed to stick. It takes a lot of glue to get heavy bird seed to adhere to paper.
Grace wanted the bird seed to make the leaves on the trees and some fallen leaves on the grass, so we smeared those areas with lots of glue. - Sprinkle the bird seed over the glue. Or dump the whole bowl at once, whatever floats your boat.
- Let it dry, praise your artist's hard work, and hand her a broom to clean up the bird seed that's all over the floor.
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