How children enrich themselves from an invitation to play

Remember how I set this up as an invitation to make stickers?? Well, after I set it up, I went off to work and when i came back, there was not a single contact paper to be seen on the tray. This is the veritable mystery of the missing contact paper. There is not a hide or a clue to where they are, and the girls dont seem to know. I suppose I will unearth them from the bottom of a bottomless pit sometime.

Instead, i found the floor littereed with color pencils and the girls were busily doing crayon resist.

Its funny, because i never really thought of Anjali to be a fan of crayon resist - I mean, the water colors are always within her reach and she paints with them quite often as are the crayons, but she never really seemed a fan of the resist process. I suppose that it may have to do with the black color paper, left over from our fractal explorations. When you draw on it with oil pastels, they show up much more dynamically than when you draw on normal white paper. Here is the simple effect of switching a single ingredient in a familiar activity and the magic appears.

So both girls were busy with crayon resist. But they didnt stop there. Anjali wanted to facilitate us to make crayon resist. Even husband joined in and between the four of us, we made all these creations.

there was this tree branch that Sophia had picked from downstairs. We had been keeping it for hanging snowflakes around Christmas, but since Christmas is still a while off, I thought of creating a temporary exhibition with the crayon resists. A collaborative family piece!