By: Pinky,
on 11/29/2010
By: Pinky,
on 10/14/2010
Hey everyone! Here is a fun Pumpkin Plate Collage activity that’s easy to do at home but most importantly fun for kids to make!
Materials:
· Orange Paper Plate
· Black or Yellow Construction Paper (any color will work)
· Scissors
Instructions:
· Invite your child to use the scissors to cut different shapes. If they are just learning to cut, feel free to help them along the way. Encourage independence by asking for their opinions: what shapes would they like to use? How do they think we could make that shape?
· Once t
By: Pinky,
on 9/29/2010
There is some ooey, gooey, and messy fun planned for the Program Room in October. Oobleck is a mixture of corn starch (polymer) and water that provides a sensory experience for kids. It has some interesting physical properties; it is both a liquid and a solid depending on how you play with it.
I sat down with Please Touch Museum's Arts Coordinator and she showed me how to make my own Oobleck at home. Here’s a recipe for Oobleck that is sure to get your little one experimenting!
Materials:
* 1 part water
* 2 parts corn starch
* Large bowl or tin to play with your OOBLECK in
* Food Coloring or Liquid Watercolor (optional)
Instructions:
Hint: Grown-ups can help with measuring but allow your child to help you make the oobleck mixture then experiment with pouring the corn starch and water. Please note that oobleck is not an exact science; it is an experiment so don't worry if your measurements are not perfect.
* Add one part water (1/2 cup of water)
* Add 2 parts corn starch (1 cup corn starch)
* Mix the ingredients well with a spoon or your hands (whatever your child’s preference)
* Your mixture should change between a liquid and a solid when handled because it is a polymer. Try to make your oobleck into different shapes- how does the oobleck react? Does it want to stay as a solid or as a liquid?
* Experiment with the ratio of water to corn starch to see which consistencies your prefer. Ask them what they think will happen next. For example, if we add more corn starch, what do you think will happen?
For a video of different ways to play with oobleck- visit this video on YouTube!
Hope you enjoy your experience and don't forget: it's okay to get a little messy!
By: Pinky,
on 9/13/2010
Starting today through Friday, September 17 the Program Room will be closed for some scheduled improvements and maintenance. In the meantime, here's a studio art experience you can try out at home! With a new school year, you may have some extra artwork hanging on your refrigerator or piling up on your desk. What is a grown up to do? RE-USE it! Invite your child to see their artwork in a whole new way with recycled Quilt Mosaics.
Materials:
• Old Artwork
• Scissors
• Glue Sticks
• Construction Paper
Implementation:
• Help your child to cut up their old artwork into different shapes. Explain to them that by taking their old work and combining it together- they are creating a new super work of art. Hint: You can trace the shapes onto your paper then cut or use a more freehand approach.
• Explain to your child how quilts are made (piecing scraps together) and used (as bedding, a throw, clothing, etc.). Show the children an example of a real quilt (from the Quilt’s of Gee’s Bend). Invite them to use their scraps and glue to create a quilt on paper.
• Practice fitting the pieces you’ve created together, side by side or overlap them.
• Remember to keep the activity child-directed by allowing your little one to be the boss! Art time is a great time to exercise your child’s ability to make independent choices and decisions.
Discussion and Information:
• Since fabric had to be woven by hand (this took a very long time to do), every scrap was precious.
• People held quilting parties so they could exchange scraps and fabric pieces to in order to obtain unique scraps and different colors.
• Colonists made the pieces into a patchwork, laying the pieces in pretty designs before stitching the whole thing together. From Colonial Kids – An Activity Guide to Life in the New World by Laurie Carlson
• Quilting is also a good way to reuse something that might otherwise have been thrown away. Try talking about other objects that might be used to create art or something useful – from trash to treasure. Other examples: Scrap Paper, Straws, Floral Foam, Leaves
By: Pinky,
on 7/19/2010
In the month of July, Please Touch Museum welcomed Child Life Specialist Interns from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) to learn about our mission of learning through play. PTM’s Staff partners with the interns and teaches them how they can help to bring learning opportunities back to the hospital with them.
The interns had the chance to interact with our visitors while Painting with Emergency Vehicles in the Program Room. They helped to familiarize the children with emergency vehicles, the places these vehicles bring you to and explain that the people driving them are there to help. It was a lot of fun and we learned a lot too!
Learning About Elements of Art Through Play: Texture refers to the way that the surface of an object appears and can also refer to the way in which different elements of artwork come together to create an overall texture. Children build up their spatial awareness by interacting and playing with the world around them. Invite your child to explore texture and their surroundings by printing with toy cars, trucks or other vehicles. Using non-traditional materials provides a creative outlet for your child to learn about new painting tools and to play with texture.
Here's how you can bring the experience into your home:
Painting with Vehicles VROOM VROOM!
Materials:
• 3-5 Toy Vehicles that can roll
• Baking Sheet to hold paint
• Sheet of Paper
• Newspaper or tablecloth to cover workspace
Directions:
• Place newspaper or table cloth over surface you are going to use to paint on
• Place a small amount of paint (about 2-4 tablespoons) onto the baking sheet and spread around to create a thin layer of paint. When printing remember the less paint you use, the better quality print you will come out with.
• Encourage your child to choose which vehicle they would like to paint with. Ask open-ended questions about the vehicle they have chosen: What kind of vehicle is it? Who drives in it? What kind of wheels does it have? Does each of the wheels have a texture that you can see? Can you feel the texture? Do you want to paint with this car/truck?
• Invite your child to drive the vehicle through the paint then drive the vehicle around their paper. Feel free to make different shapes, zig zag and move in different directions
• Repeat the process with all you
By: Pinky,
on 6/9/2010
Tomorrow, June 10, we'll be celebrating the birthday of popular author Maurice Sendak!
Come and share a special storytime and meet a Wild Thing at 10:30 am, 12:30 pm, and 3:30 pm in the Story Castle. After you meet the Wild Thing, swing by the Program Room and design your own Wild Thing. And with that, let the Wild Rumpus start!
You can also celebrate Mr. Sendak's life and work by checking out the blog art project Terrible Yellow Eyes. Over five months, dozens of artists submitted their own reinterpretations of Sendak's artwork from his most beloved book "Where the Wild Things Are." The results are as unpredictable and wild as the book itself and include different types of art, from ink drawings to dioramas to paper cut-outs. The project finished on January 1, 2010, but you can still see all of the amazing artwork.
Can you make your own Wild Thing at home? Or can you look like a Wild Thing yourself?
By: Pinky,
on 6/2/2010
The 10th Annual ABC Games presented by U.S. Airways kick off this Friday!
The Rainforest Rhythm gallery will once again be transformed into a nature themed obstacle course, with one of the highlights being a miniature rock climbing wall! The Games kick off with an Opening Day ceremony this Friday, June 4th at 10 a.m. featuring a parade through the 
museum led by our Flag Corps and concluding with the lighting of the "ABC Games Torch."
The ABC Games are a part of Please Touch Museum's Get Up and Grow™ healthy lifestyles initiative designed to enhance the lives of families by promoting healthy living to children. It's a lighthearted, interactive, content-based approach to teaching lifelong habits that result in healthier, happier families through compelling resources, exhibits, messaging, events and open-ended play. Physical fitness can easily be incorporated on a daily basis, for instance, make walking outside enjoyable by naming the trees or flowers that you see along the way!
Throughout June, visitors will be able to participate in an ABC Olympic Flag Printing activity in the Program Room, which will teach them about the Olympic Flag and the Olympic Games, all while working on hand-eye coordination, spatial reasoning, symmetry and patterns.
Here are some active lifestyle and sports-related questions you can ask your children during your visit, or at home to further engage them:
About ABC's: Do you know your ABC’s? Do you know how many vowels are in the first 5 letters of the alphabet? How about in the whole al
By: Pinky,
on 4/15/2010
Today we celebrate the birthday of a very famous artist: Leonardo da Vinci!
Da Vinci is one of the world's most renowned painters, sculptors, inventors, philosophers, architects and brilliant thinkers and was born near Florence, Italy in 1452.
One of his most famous works is his painting of the Mona Lisa currently on display at the Louvre in Paris, France. Da Vinci was not only an artist, but a very talented inventor! He was a man ahead of his time as he pondered early concepts of mathematics, flight, robotics and engineering.
To honor Da Vinci's life, kids are invited into the Program Room today to our Inventions Studio filled with KNEX and blocks, which encourage experimentation in building, design and play. They will also have the opportunity to participate in our Mona Lisa Smile Expressions activity.
We will look at and talk about the ambiguous Mona Lisa Smile, then use expression stamps to explore a variety of facial expressions. This will allow of visitors to practice interpretation of feelings or emotions in art.
Today we celebrate Leonardo da Vinci as a man who was willing to imagine, experiment and most importantly, play!
By: Pinky,
on 3/24/2010
As you may have seen in our last post, we celebrated the International Day of Puppetry on March 24, but puppetry was also the theme throughout the whole month of March in the our Program Room!
If you visited us this month, you may have created your very own PTM Puppet Pal to bring home with you! Creating paper bag puppets gave children the chance to bring their artwork to life by performing in our homemade Recycled Puppet Theater. We used a diverse set of materials including sparkles, krazy krinkle paper, stickers, pom poms and brightly patterned papers. Each puppet let our young visitors practice identification of facial features and body parts.
You can bring this experience home with you easily buy using paper lunch bags and recycled household materials around your house, like used newspaper, that can be used as clothing, or buttons that can be used to create your puppet’s face! All you need is a little bit of creativity!
Puppets are a wonderful learning tool because they encourage creative play and discovery. They allow us to communicate and express ourselves. Children can perform with puppets by using different voices, varying their motions, and also by putting them in new or exciting situations. Many people say that children will always surprise you with how they choose to use materials, and we were thrilled to see so many of our young visitors actually gathering an audience to watch their next puppet performance!
By: Pinky,
on 3/1/2010
As you know, Mono Print Making in Please Touch Museum's Program Room gave our visitors the chance to play with their art. Looking back on the beautiful masterpieces by our young visitors that were featured here on the blog last week, we see a great variety of artwork using the same tools; it's the process, not the product that matters. At Please Touch Museum, we value creativity and experimentation, and the Mono Print Making activity perfectly illustrates that each child has a unique connection and experience with art.
Thank you again to all of our talented and playful young artists for their wonderfully imaginative contributions!
Jonah, Age 3, represents a varied palette of color along with a variety of abstract shapes.
Lily, Age 3, creates art that dances across the page with contrasting yellow and blue.
Louis, Age 2, mixes and layers colors.
Maryam, Age 3, layers thin tracks of color in this exciting work of art.
Michael uses pattern and line in this mono chromatic print.
Zahirah, Age 6, lays down the pink then reprints with a darker blu
By: Pinky,
on 2/24/2010
On Monday, I told you about the wonderful Children and Teens Print Exhibition Please Touch Museum is part of for the 2010 Philagrafika Festival. The project is part of Prints Link Philadelphia, which is a coalition of community arts organizations, art centers, museums, teaching artists, and pre-k through higher education art educators who are interested in promoting printmaking for children and teens in the Philadelphia region. We here at Please Touch Museum are thrilled to be a part of a project that truly appreciates the educational value and celebrates the unique creativity of children's art.
Take a peek at today's featured mono prints made by some of Please Touch Museum's very talented young visitors and artists! And be sure to check back here on Friday for the final batch of mono prints.
Ashley uses a rainbow of colors to create an interesting pattern.
Brent, Age 5, creates patches of color using foam brushes.
Caitlin, Age 7, uses a varied set of tools to create angular patterns.
Charlotte, Age 2, enjoys mono printing as a sensory experience.
David, Age 8, depicts a smiling face in his mono print.
By: Pinky,
on 1/25/2010
Here at Please Touch Museum, we make music in a lot of different ways. One fun way that we explore music is by putting together groups of instruments that are generally found together.
As you may know, February is "Junior Jazz" month at Please Touch Museum, so we will be having a "Jazz Café" in the Program Room made up of instruments that are typically found in jazz combos! There will be a little piano, a trumpet, a flute and, of course, lots of drums. Kids will have the opportunity to listen to some jazz music and play along, and even make up songs of their own! By doing this, they'll learn about the context surrounding different types of music, as well as hearing the differences between musical styles. Kids also be learning about how to produce different sounds and what different instruments look, feel and sound like-- all while having fun. It's the perfect example of how Please Touch Museum's mission of learning through play comes alive!
Besides exposure to different types of instruments and genres, music is important for early childhood education. Children learn by exploring the world around them, so music is a perfect introduction to math with emphasis on numbers and counting musical beats. Language and vocabulary skills are boosted as well when singing songs. In this particular music program, we will tie in geography and history by traveling around the world to explore music from other cultures. Making music is also one of the best ways to build our hand-eye coordination, self-expression, creativity, team work skills and foster self confidence and joy.
A great way that you can hold your own "jam session" at home after visiting the museum is by having a family band. You can use re-purposed objects like pots and pans and play along to different types of music, or just make up your own songs. Everyone can count off together and take turns singing verses, or you can all sing together-- however your band makes music, it's sure to be a harmonious experience for everyone!
On your next visit, be sure to check out all the different instruments and fun in the Program Room. Most Musical Playtimes take place Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays at 2 p.m., with the exception of special performance days. For details, check the "Today's Fun" signs on the gallery floor.
By: Pinky,
on 1/15/2010
By: Pinky,
on 12/3/2009
Please Touch Museum's Program Room has some new activities to help usher in the holiday season!
At our 'Shaving Cream Paint' activity, kids can create their own paintings using a unique type of paint, a mixture of shaving cream, glue, and liquid water color paint. The glue added to the shaving cream makes it more viscous and thick, making it easier to use as a painting medium and enabling it to dry nicely in place.
'Tracks in the Snow' uses the same paint mixture as Shaving Cream Paint, except in this activity kids can use it to create their own winter landscapes on construction paper. Once they make their snowy patch, kids can use animal toys to make animal prints and tracks, to create a unique and beautiful nature scene.
Continued from November's programming, kids can create a card for someone they love at our 'Holiday Cards and Mail Art' activity. We emphasize the importance of staying in touch with families and friends especially during this holiday season. As we play and create we are aiding in school readiness. This activity acts as a basic introduction to the mail system by showing our little visitors how to write and address a letter. In addition, we practice memory recall by remembering what you liked most about your visit!
We do hope you'll come see us in the Program Room this holiday season to take part in our open-ended, child directed, and process driven art experiences!
By: Pinky,
on 12/1/2009
Time flies when you're having fun... and we had SO much fun in the Program Room in the month of November!
Visitors had a chance to create quilt mosaics, which involves cutting pieces of paper into different shapes and designs then pasting them onto multicolored construction paper. We learned a lot about color, shape, and pattern. We also played with crayon and watercolor resists and saw how these two materials interact with each other. It was loads of fun!
And as you know, keeping in touch with friends and family is important, especially during the upcoming holiday season. We learned about the mail system by practicing how to write and address a letter. "Mail Art" and "Holiday Card" activities will continue through December in the Program Room,
so please come visit us and create your own! See you soon!
By: Pinky,
on 10/20/2009
Please Touch Museum is celebrating the birthdays of two very important artists this week!
Today, October 20, we celebrated the work of Crockett Johnson. Mr. Johnson is probably most famous to kids as the author and illustrator of the Harold and the Purple Crayon series of books. The first Harold book was published in 1955 and since then he has become an emblematic figure of children's literature, one of its most recognizable and beloved characters. Harold's adventures are wonderful depictions of the elaborate dramas and complex imaginative play that can arise from simple materials.
Mr. Johnson was also the creator of the comic strip Barnaby, which was a very popular comic in the 1940s and 1950s about a 5-year-old boy named Barnaby and his friends and family.
To celebrate the legacy of this wonderful author, some of PTM's artists created their own stories at our "Purple Crayon Drawing" activity. Here are some examples of their great work:
And on Thursday, October 22, we will be celebrating the birthday of artist Robert Rauschenberg! Rauschenberg was an American artist born in Texas in 1925. He was a pioneering artist in the use of non-traditional materials and found objects in art, especially in his combines. By using objects from the everyday world in his art, Rauschenberg gave ordinary things a new and interesting meaning.
On Thursday, to celebrate this important artist, kids can explore their own creativity and create their own mixed media artworks in our Program Room! Be sure to stop by!
By: Pinky,
on 9/3/2009
Throughout September, Please Touch Museum will be celebrating Dancing Days! This month-long series of activities and special performances are designed to introduce children to different types of dance and encourage them to find their own way to dance.
Dancing is a fun and creative way for children to express themselves, while promoting an active and healthy lifestyle. Dancing is something anyone can do in their own unique way. It also offers children a special way to learn about the parts of the body and practice and further develop their balance, coordination, and gross motor skills. The activities in our Program Room this month are based around the idea of moving our bodies, and exploring and exercising all of these areas of development.
In our Program Room, there's a ton going on during Dancing Days. At our Degas' Dancers activities, kids can view the artwork of French painter Edgar Degas, who is famous for his portraits of dancers, and then use oil pastels to create their own drawings. Once they've drawn a dancer, it will be high time they danced themselves, which they can do at our Dress Up Play table! With a tutu, boa, fairy wings, or foot taps kids can creatively express themselves through movement and motion. Kids can also learn about the parts of the body while making their own Pipe Cleaner People. Acrobats are a manipulative toy that can be attached, detached, reattached, re-detached, bent, structured, and swiveled in near infinite combination. And our visitors can also enjoy two of our favorite activities, blocks and Floam.
I hope to see you hear during Dancing Days at Please Touch Museum, but the fun doesn't have to stop once you go back home! The great thing about dancing is you can do it ANYWHERE!
By: Pinky,
on 8/11/2009
Today I'd like to share some really cool pieces of art that kids made in our Program Room recently. Be sure to stop by next time you visit!
Enjoy.
You won't find a license plate that looks like this just about anywhere in the Keystone State. This was created at our "License Plate Rubbing" activity.
Lune's map from our "Make a Map" activity traipses through South America, Gallia
In this picture, our friend Cade used a lot of bright tempera paint for vibrant colors, circles and lines to create a wonderfully imaginative football. Or maybe a flower? Or ferris wheel? Or a jelly fish? 
We'll be there. Can't wait.
Jenn from Professor of Play