Fruit Loop Flower...Never Again

Have your kids ever used dot art painters? My kindergartners used to love them. We'd use them to make dots along the lines of a letter. See what I mean here.

I haven't bought ER any because we've used them in play group and she hasn't gotten the hang of them yet. She smears and doesn't dot, which is fine but doesn't exactly move them to the top of my must buy right now list.

I've been thinking about dot art...this activity was very loosely inspired by them. My original intention was to make a flower dot to dot like picture for her. Then she'd practice using the glue bottle by making dots of glue on top of each one.

If you direct your child to use their glue bottle to make dots that completely cover the dot you drew, you can make this activity harder or easier. Depending on how advanced your child's fine motor skills are, just adjust the size of the dots you make, smaller ones requiring more skills. A fruit loop would be placed on top of the glue, and the end result would be an abstract flower picture. I did this with shapes like circles and squares when I taught special education, and it worked out really well.

Well it seemed like a good idea to do a flower, since it's spring and all...but my perfectionist tendencies came out in full force. I didn't like any of the ones I made. So I decided to find one online, and came up with this.

Of course, it kind of defeated the point since there were no longer dots for her to see and target. In hindsight, I should have made dots on top of the outline...and the activity was probably too hard for her anyway, but you know what they say about hindsight.

The beginning went really well. We looked at flower pictures discussed the stem and the petals. She told me the stem was green and sorted out green fruit loops for it. She also decided to use red for the petals and sorted those out of our big bowl of cereal too. Then it went quickly downhill.

The end result was that Mommy had to do hand-over-hand with the little one, and since she's going through a strong independent streak this caused her to wail, "Noooooooo...I do it myself Mommy! No hold my hand," so it was frustrating all around. Glue went everywhere as she wouldn't let go as I tried to pry the bottle out of her hands. She refused to put the cereal on top after all that.

So we gave up, until twenty minutes later. By this time the glue was dried, and she decided that it was the ONLY thing she has ever wanted to do in her whole entire life. More tantrums followed, until we made glue dots together AGAIN. By this time I was red in the face and super annoyed from struggling with her.

She put on the cereal in a huff and the second she was done...she THREW the two containers of fruit loops in the air. Mommy needed a time out in the bathroom after that, where I counted to ten so I could keep my cool. Then to the sweet sounds of a howling two and a half year old exiled to the second stair from the bottom, I cleaned up fruit loops from all over my kitchen floor.

So how did your day go?

PS: To see some more successful activities, check out Ramblings of a Crazy Woman's weekly Friday Showcase.