Diwali and early Bonfire Night art

(Goblin is 24 months)

Diwali is known as the festival of light. Like the Christian's Easter celebration it moves date according to the moon. This year it will be celebrated on Wednesday 26 October. Ever since I lived in the east end of London and was kept awake for a week each year by the incessant fireworks of our Hindu neighbours I have had a bit of a soft spot for this Indian festival. If you want to know a bit more about Diwali I found a good "everything you need to know about Diwali" on the website http://www.theholidayspot.com/diwali/. 

I thought I'd do a bit of Diwali inspired arts and crafts with Goblin. He has got quite excited by painting recently and with the evenings getting dark so early it gives us something nice to do before tea and bed. 

I found a bottle of PVA glue in Tesco which had a spout top. I got him to squeeze the glue and flick it up and down the pages. As you can see the flicking worked well but there were big gobs of glue that still haven't dried 12 hours later! 
I poured some different colours of glitter into a pallet. I wanted Goblin to pick the glitter up in pinches using his pincer grip, but he found this too difficult so I poured some into the palm of his hand and let him throw it on the pages instead. That worked well but didn't get quite the wide spread I would have liked. 

Goblin enjoyed the glue but decided he wanted to do some proper painting too. So we did some bonfire hand prints. I painted his hand with red and yellow and he splatted it down. He recognised the colour orange which the red and yellow made - this excited me, although he didn't recognise the colour red or yellow! We did some glue and glitter over the bonfire paintings as well. 

And hey presto an early bit of Bonfire Night art. Diwali always falls reasonably close to Bonfire night. For any non-Brits who are unaware of the delights of Bonfire night, it falls on the 5 November. It is a British celebration of the failed gunpowder plot of 1605 when a bunch of Catholics tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament. We celebrate by burning models of Guy Fawkes - the key conspirator - on big bonfires, and setting off a ton of fireworks to imitate what it would have looked like had the plot succeeded. You can read about the Gun powder plot at http://www.bonfirenight.net/gunpowder.php.
I'm linking this to the Sunday Showcase where you can find lots of other fun things to do with kids.