creativity abounds

J's been on a creativity spree this week. The crayons, scissors, and paper are just flying around here. Over the weekend, I was talking with my friend Kerri (fellow Enki-ite) about how J loved to do craft projects on his own (from instructions he comes across in various books and magazines), but that it's hard for me to draw him into a planned craft activity. She had suggested just continuing to make project ideas available to him, and letting him explore various media on his own.

But in typical J fashion, he didn't even give me the chance to try to locate project ideas to leave out for him to discover -- he went ahead and found his own source. A Children's Atlas provided the inspiration to create map of our neighborhood. Here it is:

It's amazingly accurate, actually. The orientation of our house to to the road is a bit off, but otherwise, he's got our neighbors' and our houses in the right locations and colors, and everything is labeled appropriately. And I was pleased with the mixed use of pencil and crayons -- that's new for him. In fact, I've been seeing him picking up the crayons (as opposed to his magnadoodle) more frequently in general these days.

Here's another project, a paper airplane he decorated. This is the bottom. This is also a map -- I can see some Pokemon details, Fire Island and others. I believe the intent was that the plane would take you to "Poke-land" by following the directions on the map (I have no idea where the Pokemon live or come from, by the way, I make most of this stuff up!).

Here's the top side of the same plane. Again, I see Fire Island, on the left wing, and I believe that's Lightening Island on the right wing (but I could have that name wrong). On both the top and the bottom of the plane map, there are arrows showing the flight path.


Another project (from the Japan page of the atlas) was Origami Penguins. My favorite part of this was how J improvised. We don't have origami paper, which is colored on one side and white on the other, so he took white paper and colored one side black with a crayon, then cut squares out of that paper to fold his penguins out of. All entirely his idea, including making his own two-toned paper and making penguins of various sizes to depict an entire family of penguins. Naturally, the penguins went to live on our frozen winter Nature Table, along with the walruses, seals and polar bears. (Although J was careful to point out that penguins live at the antarctic, while polar bears live at the arctic. But he said since they both live on ice and snow, it was OK to have them together here in our house.)