Makes My Monday-Op Art Swirls

Opt: An Illusionary Tale is a wonderful book that takes place during a castle celebration. It is filled with optical illusions and visual tricks. It is a wonderful book for children of all ages.

After getting this book from the library I searched for our own opt art to do with the kids. This is what I found.
These were so easy to make, we were very surprised with our wonderful results.

First put a dot at the center of your paper. Make 8 triangular shapes with wavy lines, beginning in the center and going outward to the edges of the paper. In every other triangular shape, draw wavy lines.

Next, connect the wavy lines with straight lines.

This is an example of all the lines drawn. I used two warm colors to color in the wavy lines and cool colors for the straight lines.

You can see the progression in these pictures.

All done----We just love the look of these "op art swirls"

Grace busily working

This was a fun project for our little children to work on.

From left to right: Mark's art, Amy's art and Gracie's art.
We taped these together carefully to use as wrapping paper.

It looked wonderful.

And as it happened to be Grandpa's birthday, he received our "art" wrapped gift. We had him unwrap very carefully so he could save the pictures, which are now hanging proudly on his fridge.

Spinning-Top Art

We combined art, crafts and science this week when we made these spinning art tops.

We needed:

cardstock

scissors

crayons or markers

glue

q-tips (or something narrow to use as a spinner)

We cut out circles from the cardstock, about 3 inches in diameter. Put a tiny hole in the very center of your circle. This is for older kids, so they can make their designs around the center. Color a design you want to try spinning.

Above are some rainbow spinners. We used a q-tip with the cotton removed and sharpened at one end to a point. (Use whatever you have--that's what I say) Put this into the center of your cardstock. We then added glue to the top and bottom of this center point. We didn't do this at first, and the holes in the tops quickly became to loose to spin. Dry this in a glass as shown above for about an hour.

Then comes the spinning fun!

Even Luke-3 was able to get these tops spinning. It is also interesting to see the colors mix as they spin.

This top was colored in quarters with red and blue.The spinning results are a lovely purple. You can't see it very well here, but the top becomes totally purple. We also tried yellow and blue to make green, but I think the blue was to dark and we didn't get a real good green.

Here is a very badly videotaped example of our spinning.

Unplugged Project--color

There is a website that hosts an "unplugged" project every week and this weeks project is color. We haven't participated in this before, but we had such fun joining in the Operation Playtime activities I thought we would join in this weekly fun also.I have seen this activity done for mess-free finger painting, but I thought it would also be a good way to show color mixing.

We started with the same base we use for homemade fingerpaint.

1/3 c. sugar

1 c. corn starch

4 c. water

Mix these ingredients together and then cook on low heat until thick. Stirring constantly.

Let cool.

When this was cool we divided this mixture into 3 bowls and added red, blue, and yellow food coloring.

mix, mix, mix

Mark finished off the mixing to make sure the colors were well blended.

I placed a big spoonful of each of the three colors into a ziplock bag. I then sealed the bag with packing tape (or you can use duct tape).

I showed the kids how to carefully blend the colors to make new colors. This kept them busy for a quite a while. (A very good thing.) It is a real neat feeling pushing the colors around in the bags.

Of course, it wouldn't be real fun if it didn't involve a little silliness.

We practiced writing letters and shapes in our paint. You can see above how cool the blending becomes after you work with it for a while. Our littlest learners also picked out and named colors as we did this activity.

Of course, if you are nine years old, and are really, really good at blending we discovered you get the color brown.

Hands on learning is definitely the best.

Make sure you go and visit all the great color activities at this weeks Unplugged website.