During one of our backyard camp-outs, I brought the box of foil out to the tent and let the girls explore ways to create and play with it. They had such fun! Delaney is especially taken with the foil and asks for it all the time. Here’s a few things we have done to explore and play with foil:
Foil, with its shiny and slick surface, can be a wonderful alternative to paper for exploring drawing materials in a different way. Encourage your child to try all kinds of mediums to draw on the foil – crayons, markers, colored pencils, etc. Gel markers and metallic crayons make really neat effects too! The girls love experimenting to see what materials “show up.” To make the foil easier to work with, and less likely to tear, try gluing a sheet of foil to a piece of construction paper before beginning your project.
We recently tried out our Crayola Slick Stix
Another fun way to explore foil is sculpting. Foil can be bent and twisted, scrunched up in a ball or smashed flat. The girls made rings, bowls filled with little peas, and lots and lots of flat cookies. They loved rolling up the foil into balls, then stomping on the balls with their feet.
Try making shiny “moon rocks” with foil. Then hide them and let your child hunt for them with a flashlight.
The girls also enjoy using some of their foil shapes to poke into playdough or to make prints with paint or stamp pads.
More fun with foil:
Foil Reliefs at Morningstar Green Time
Mexican Metal Tooling at Pepper Paints
Share your ideas for playing with foil, too!
Have a great weekend!
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We’ve not yet explored much with foil – but this post sure has piqued my curiosity. This summer we’ve found great joy with rolls of masking tape. It’s 75 cents a roll and brings lots of joy and creativity: http://funmajors.blogspot.com/2008/07/tape-sticks-again.html – we even “Recycled” the used tape and made a huge ball to play wiffle ball…perfect for preschoolers to hit.
idea for the coffee filters – place 4 on top of each other then pinch from the top to the bottom and secure with a pipe cleaner (tightly). The rest of the pipe cleaner will be the stem of a flower. Tease (pull – separate) the sides of the coffee filters till you have a flower.
My kids love to make “trophies” out of foil–they use papercups (upside down) for the base, and sometimes add popsicle sticks, and anything else they can find. It is a fun thing for the Olympics!
My kids love to make “trophies” out of foil–they use papercups (upside down) for the base, and sometimes add popsicle sticks, and anything else they can find. It is a fun thing for the Olympics!