We decided to end our Artsy Babies series with some movement and dance.  We taught our participants a choreographed dance routine and had a super fabulously fun dance party under some strobe lights!  This was the 4th and final installment of the Artsy Babies program. 

This was our first time planning and facilitaing a program like this and we weren't sure what the level of interest would be. We recieved a great deal of positive feedback from caregivers that attended every session.  Caregivers mentioned how much they loved the music classes.

If and when we do this series again, we may focus solely on music and movement as we already offer an art program for babies called "Mini Masterpieces."

Overall, this was a really fun program to put together and I am so glad to have had the opportunity to try and offer something new!

Previous posts about the Artsy Babies programming series can be found by clicking on the links below.
Week 1: Music & Movement
Week 2: Art
Week 3: Musical Instruments

This is a new board book series that we ordered for Artsy Babies, but alas, they did not arrive in time save for this one.  

We decided to teach everyone a choreographed dance routine to "Can't Stop This Feeling" from the Trolls movie.  We used the movie version with Anna and JT.

To see a short video of the dance click here.

I decided to purchase this awesome Strobe Light from Amazon and I think it was the best $10.00 I have ever spent!  It comes with a remote and several different light settings.  

Our participants had a blast dancing it out and the lights really added an extra element of fun!

The .GIF to the left is a demonstration of the strobe light and also serves as an accurate representation of how awesome life is at The Lawton Lodge.

This was our third program in our Artsy Babies series.  Week 2 was Art and week 1 was Music and Movement.
This is a new series that we are piloting this spring and so far it has been fairly popular.  

Today was musical instrument day for Artsy Babies!  We played with bells, rattles, and egg shakers.  There was singing, shaking, and ringing!

 We had some of the instruments shown in this book on hand, so we demonstrated the sounds of those instruments as the story was read aloud.  We also gave caregivers and babies time to try out the different instruments at the end of the program.

​If you are interested in checking out this song, the album cover is a link to Amazon where you can listen to a sample and purchase it.

Today's theme for Artsy Babies was art!  We found a very cute printable that allowed caregivers to turn their baby's fingerprints into balloons, we did some painting in a bag, and made mini paper collages with Ellison die cut-outs and contact paper.  

The biggest challenge for today's program was keeping the art projects simple and relatively mess-free while also trying to make the projects different from our Mini Masterpieces program (which is an art-specific program for babies and caregivers).

We used this book from the Alphaprints board book series because fingerprints are used to form the illustrations.  We thought that would tie in nicely to the fingerprint art!

My colleague found these darling elephant printables.  Caregivers pressed baby's fingers into washable non-toxic stamp pads and used baby's tiny inky fingers to make balloons.  We also included some washable markers for caregivers to write baby's name, the date, or to draw any additional details they wanted onto the page.  We provided Babyganics wipes for caregivers to clean baby's fingers after they were done creating their fingerprint masterpiece.

We used Crayola washable finger paint, white cardstock, and gallon sized Ziploc bags.  We cut two inches off of the top of the cardstock so that it would fit nicely into the Ziploc bags.  We also squirted a dollop of paint onto each piece of cardstock, carefully placed the cardstock inside of the bags, and sealed the bags.  The bags held up really well!  The caregivers even found the painting in a bag to be soothing!

We set out an assortment of Ellison-die cut shapes, pre-cut contact paper, and sheets of cardstock for caregivers and babies to make mini paper murals.  This was our most popular activity.