Yesterday we decided to make Amanda Blake Soule’s recipe for homemade paste from her book The Creative Family: How to Encourage Imagination and Nuture Family Connections. The recipe is 3 parts flour to 1 part sugar warmed on a stove while you mix in water and get it to just the right consistency. Then you add 1 tsp of vinegar. Our paste turned out slightly lumpy but it did work. We used beans and seeds and the bottom of a pasta box to make our art.
The boys were intrigued by the paste- although after first touching it they decided that mom should do most of the gluing. This activity could be greatly improved by using only found objects – or perhaps pulling apart pine cones and using pine needles instead of seeds and beans from the kitchen. It felt strange to tell the boys not to eat the ‘art supplies.”
Also after reading an essay in Rethinking Early Childhood Education in which a teacher recalls the look of horror on a recent immigrant child’s face when the class is going to use rice for a play material-I think that it is important to teach respect for food. I do let my boys “play” with dry beans just before we wash them. I consider it a longer part of the sorting and searching for rock process. They get to use measuring cups and teaspoons to move the beans about back and forth from one bowl to another. At the end we collect all the beans for washing, soaking and cooking. That activity is different than actually gluing down the food.
In actuality our art was much more satisfying to the boys once we also pasted down some pictures from our favorite magazines.
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