Dots Galore

Last weekend marked one of our favorite annual holidays celebrating creativity (it holds a close tie with Very Hungry Caterpillar Day on March 20th). International Dot Day is every mid-September and is inspired by the picture book The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds, encouraging children to keep an open mind in their own art.

The book inspires young artists and teachers to appreciate where just one little dot can take you. Dot Day is celebrated in classrooms, museums, libraries, and communities across the globe, including here at The Carle.

We had a few different dot-making stations throughout the room.

Here are some guests making 3D dots with skinny strips of construction paper and staplers.

Pretty transparent dots with small pieces of tissue paper stuck on a contact paper backing.

There was also a dot stamping station where all things round were pressed into red stamp pads. Turns out the eraser-end of a pencil makes great mini-dots for writing words.

Bottle caps, corks, empty rolls of tape and apple sauce containers provided a fun variety of circles for stamping onto construction paper dots or big pieces of white paper. Notice we only put out red stamp pads so stampers didn’t get colors mixed up.

Till next year’s Dot Day, continue “Making Your Mark”! 

Making Art with Children is generously sponsored by the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority.