Open-Ended Art: Mosaic (Beans)

The Open-ended Art Carnival is now over at Growing And Learning By Leaps And Bounds with this week's theme: Bean Mosaic. So go on there and take a look at what other mummies are doing with their little ones on this theme. And here is what Sophie have done...

Before we started working on the craft, I had to stock up on beans - many different types of beans. We do not really eat beans so it was quite an experience for me to shop for beans of different colour, size and texture. I grabbed some black beans, red beans, green beans, black eye beans and some other "bean" looking foods like sago and popcorn from a provision shop. I avoided kidney beans (too expensive) and soy beans (look like black eye beans). And I took the opportunity to get some orange and pandan essence for Sophie's scent bottles.

We began with creating the base for the mosaic. I wanted to let Sophie experience using a different sort of adhesive material so I "sacrificed" the jumping clay. It ought to dry and harden after a day or two and it should hold small objects pretty well. Hopefully, she would not be able to remove the beans easily.

After the base was done, I put some beans for the mosaic on small jelly containers and let Sophie play a little with them. I must admit I was very nervous about the potential mess so we moved to the kitchen for today's craft. Around then, I began to daydream about her doing all her future art and craft without her highchair.

To me, Sophie's patience was quite admirable. I was bored to tears with fixing tiny beans onto the jumping clay base but she was rather accomodating. And it felt great to just sit with her while she worked on the craft.

Of course our session was not perfect! Sophie spilled the beans several times throughout and we had to painstakingly pick up all the beans each time. Fortunately, she helped.

The result was alright. I think it provided Sophie a chance to exercise some patience and focus. But more importantly, it opened up new channels to what activities we can do going forward.

For a start, she started fiddling around with the end product after it dried completely.