Magic Messages

I saw this activity on Pinterest and thought I'd give it a try today when the kids asked to paint during school time. The magic part of it worked pretty well, but not quite as good as it looked on Pinterest. Seems to be the going theme with most of my Pinterest projects. :) 

Anyways. Here's what you do. Write on a white piece of paper with a white crayon. I messed up with Charis because I just wrote her name in really big letters across the whole sheet of paper. I forgot that when she paints, she usually just paints in little circles all over the page - she doesn't really cover the paper. So with Cayman, I separated the sheet of paper into blocks. Then in each block, I wrote a different letter or drew an object. The first block has his name. I then told him which color to paint in each block (this was partly because I was being a little OCD with a new set of watercolors...I didn't want that set to become all nasty like all of our others. So I reiterated one color per block, rinsing the brush, etc.) The white crayon is supposed to block out the water colors so that the crayon magically appears when you paint over it. It showed up pretty well. And the magic was kind of lost because Cayman could actually see the white crayon markings on the white paper! :) So he just painted over the white crayon. But it was still fun, he still learned some new skills (painting with water colors, following instructions, etc.), and we worked on our shapes, letters and name recognition. The past few times we've done school, I have been very proud of his progression! His attention span has gotten a lot longer. And I've also noticed that he's getting better at grasping a pencil, marker, crayon, etc. I don't focus too much on the actual writing aspect of the activity because I know that will be a bigger focus next year for us. But this year I would really like for him to learn how to grasp correctly and at least get the whole writing concept.