Out Like a Lion

I read a tot school idea about crumpling paper and was inspired to have Sweet Pea crumple pieces of yellow tissue paper for a mane and then glue them onto a lion head (a cut-out yellow circle w/ construction paper eyes, mouth and nose).

Her idea of crumpling was not quite as thorough as mine was. She was more interested in just shoving the (mostly uncrumpled) pieces of tissue paper into the cup I provided to hold them. After several demonstrations she got a little better at it, but never seemed to be having a super good time.

She was very excited about the gluing however. It’s amazing how many things that I take for granted that I know how to do without even thinking about them. It seems as if it would be so easy to glue one piece of paper to another, but watching Sweet Pea’s mistakes were fascinating. First, she sort of thought the glue stick was a crayon and spent a lot of time just drawing on the paper. I had to keep telling her, “Okay, that’s enough. Put the glue stick down now.” (Part of this may be that it is a Crayola glue stick that goes on blue.) Then she had a lot of trouble actually putting the wadded up pieces of paper onto the glue spot. She couldn’t quite hit the target, so to speak. When she did get the paper in the right place, she just set it on top. She didn’t know to press the paper down to make it stick. Towards the end, she started getting much better, but I was sort of stunned about how bad I was at teaching her. I think I need to read more about the Montessori style of teaching how to present a new activity.

She also didn’t know or care that a lion doesn’t have a mane on his nose or eyes. It sort of drove me crazy that she kept sticking the paper everywhere. I wanted to grab her hand and put it where the mane should actually go. I was very pleased with myself that I fought that impulse down and let her have fun gluing the paper wads wherever she wanted.

Rating: Crumpling gets 2/4 stars (Easy to set up and Frugal) while gluing the paper to the lion gets 3/4 stars (Easy, Frugal and Fun). Nothing about this activity could be done independently from mom yet.