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Free printable for families! Play Shapes

I am so happy to introduce my new Play Shapes resource for families! This is a free PDF print out that is given to everyone who signs up to the Art Play Children Learning mailing list! The resources, which was developed with Beam Editions, features 10 pages of funky, colorful shapes that have been inspired by the art of Josef Albers, Bruno Munari, Henri Matisse, and Geta Brătescu. If you would like a copy, you can sign up to the mailing list here: [mailerlite_form form_id=1] The shapes can be printed on either regular printing paper or transparency film. In this post, I share some activity ideas for what you can do with them! Experimenting with light and shadow You can use Play Shapes to explore phenomena like light, shadow, opacity and translucency. First, print the shapes onto transparency film and cut them out. You can then add art tools, set…

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Learning

The Nature of Play book review

In our busy and digital-driven world, many children have little opportunity to engage in everyday play in nature. Recent research has also illustrated that technology is significantly affecting how children think and focus their attention, with some screen-based games significantly restricting the use of imagination and creativity. The Nature of Play: A Handbook of Nature-Based Activities for all Seasons offers a remedy to this dilemma. The book features 44 play activities for children and adults in gardens, forests and city parks throughout the four seasons. For example, the Spring section of the book features activities such as ‘Get to know a tree’ and ‘plan a picnic.’ The Winter section then offers more indoor play prompts such as ‘build your own marble run’ and ‘rainy day games.’ Other activities include: Make your own pinhole camera using a recycled Pringles tubeCreative a beautiful seasonal mobile using objects collected from nature Construct a sand volcano…

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Children's creative spaces

Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s family learning program

This post features an interview with Emma Spencer, Family Learning Coordinator at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (UK).  The Yorkshire Sculpture Park sits upon 500 acres of jolly green parkland that an Australian who has never visited rural England may be pitifully excited to see. The open-air gallery won the 2014 Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year and is also home to the National Arts Education Archive. In 2014 the Park was awarded a three- year grant from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to conduct an action-research project looking at the development of its family-learning programme. I recently spoke with Emma Spencer about the project’s findings and future plans for early years learning at the gallery. Could you please give some background on the action research project? What were your initial ideas and motivations? Starting out, the key focus of the research was around bringing people from the community together with the Park.…

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