Using Fine Motor Skills in Art Therapy
For anyone who has never worked with paper mâché, we highly recommend it. It’s rather therapeutic and relaxing…and very, very messy! Plus, our students get to use their fingers and fine motor skills to create a huge piece of art!
Day two of art therapy camp was productive. We flipped our dragonfly over to paper mâché his belly. (I would like to thank Ricky for his brilliant suggestion on how to best secure our dragonfly’s wings to his body. His suggestion worked perfectly! We used dowel rods through the swim noodles the keep the wings up and connected to the “body” of the dragonfly! The weight of the paper mâché may have caused the wings to sag otherwise. Thank you, Ricky!)
Miss Poncie stirred up our paste. The water likes to separate from the flour, so you have to constantly be stirring it to make sure it doesn’t settle.
We used brushes to “paint” on the paste to the paper pieces to keep down some of the mess. We ended up ditching them and using our fingers. Way more fun!
James really got into it! I am so proud of him, too. He sometimes doesn’t like to get messy, but he dove right in there and worked so hard and did a great job! Way to go, James!
This is Mary Shelton’s first camp! She used her delicate fingers to put that paper down. She did a great job. And she looked great doing it!
Did you know a dragonfly has over 30,000 eyes? And can see it’s surroundings from all directions? These are just a few facts about dragonflies that we learned today in class.
We also started our Project Butterfly today…and we are very excited about it! We will keep you updated on the latest.