How to.... do something: How to teach the Alphabet

My older daughter Lilo has been very interested in our letter crafts. She even took out an alphabet board book from her school library to give us for inspiration. Hands for H was her idea. I'm usually not a fan of what I call "messy paints" but once and awhile I give in.

When Isla and I were out a few weeks ago and we were sitting by a glass wall that had a red advertisement on it, she was looking through it at the cars driving by and said "hey, look, a purple car". I thought that seems weird so we looked over the wall and saw that it was just a blue car that looked purple because of the red wall. We had fun looking at what colours the red wall made things look.

And so since we were recently talking about mixing colours I thought this would be a fun way to see how you can make other colours from red, yellow and blue.

So she put one had in red and one in blue, rubbed them together and made purple.

One hand red and one hand yellow, squish together - you get orange.

Stamp them on white paper.

Blue and yellow smooshed together make green.

She had lots of fun making hand prints.

And free form finger/hand painting and she wanted to see what white did to colours too at this point.

And just painting her hands and arms. We went through a lot of paper that day and have a big clean up but it wasn't too bad. The table cloth is plastic, she had a painting shirt on and the bit that got on her clothes underneath washed out. And a big scrub in the sink and her arms returned to their natural colour.

Somewhere along the way she printed her hands on the letter H that I had traced on to a piece of paper and then she cut it out and glued on to another piece of paper.