We decided at the last minute to have a tea party with the art group and to make tissue paper suncatchers.
It all started with a book that Maia currently loves, called Ella Sarah Gets Dressed by Margaret Chodos-Irvine. She has the entire thing memorized and likes to trade off "reading" the pages. The book is about a little girl who wants to dress up in colorful (mismatched) clothes but her family keeps suggesting practical, plain clothes. Ella Sarah prevails, dresses to the nines, and then the doorbell rings. All her friends are dressed up too and they have a tea party! Maia asks for a tea party every time we read the book, so we decided to have one for the art group.
We read Ella Sarah Gets Dressed first thing in the morning, Maia picked out her own outfit (not too outlandish), and we made strawbery scones and almond cookies.
Maia's eating a scone before her friends show up. I completely forgot to take photos after everyone arrived, unfortunately, but I did take some of our art project.
I wanted a mess-free art project since we were asking people to come dressed up. So we made suncatchers with tissue paper and Con-Tact paper -- a project that Julie Liddle of Art in Hand had told me was a favorite in her classes.
The kids tore colored tissue paper into little pieces while we taped the Con-Tact paper to the windows sticky-side out. We gave each child a little plastic bag of the torn tissue paper and they arranged the pieces on the sticky paper. Here's Caleb, above, working on his suncatcher. Afterwards, we added another piece of Con-Tact paper to the top, sandwiching in the tissue paper.
Oh, and by the way, Ella Sarah Get's Dressed was loaned to us by a friend. We swapped boxes of our daughters' toys and books temporarily, partly just as a way to share but also so our daughters would have renewed interest in their own toys when they got them back. We've really enjoyed the swap and recommend that everyone try it! It's been a great way to try new things that I wouldn't think to buy or just don't have the money to buy.
