Project objective: to support fine motor development and hand eye coordination, while fostering a connection between the children and the outdoors.
Skill development: creativity, confidence, hand eye coordination, fine motor, sensory experience, observation, letter/name writing, and patterns.
One of the best things about winter is when the sunshine falls on the snow and creates a breathtaking sparkle. We wanted to highlight this beauty in an art project.
When you think of making a project sparkly, you probably think of glitter first. Glitter is composed of tiny bits of plastic that are nearly impossible to keep from getting all over your classroom, yard during transport from school to home, and the inside of your home. Rather than adding more pieces of plastic to the environment, I offer salt as a way for children to add sparkle to their projects.
The children cut out snowflakes and put them in a glass pan. We made a salty water mixture by dissolving ¼ cup of salt in 2 cups of water.
We poured it over the snowflakes just enough to cover them and sprinkled extra coarse salt on top. We lifted the snowflakes out, keeping the extra salt on top, and left them to dry on the table. Air drying the snowflake allows for the salt to stick to the paper. We came back to school the next day to dry, sparkly snowflakes!
When displaying the snowflakes, we used clothes pins and string. These are some of my favorite zero waste tools as a teacher because it eliminates the use of single-use tape significantly when hanging art projects.