For a simple spin on a classic medium, try colored glue! Children love glue, in fact, more than once I’ve prepared a collage type activity, only to have some of the children spend the entire time playing with the glue, and never using it to adhere anything to the paper! Well, it’s time to let glue have a well-deserved turn in center stage! Simply add food coloring or water color powder to regular old Elmer’s and mix with a popsicle stick, right inside the bottle. Put the caps back on and you’re ready to fire! (Well, nearly. It’s actually best if you have time to leave them on their sides, and rotate a time or two to get the color mixed in fully. That is, if it didn’t mix completely when you stirred.)
Depending upon their fine motor control and strength, your wee ones can fill their art papers with color straight from the bottle, or with paint brushes (fill baby food jar lids with the colored glue and have them use small “watercolor brushes”). Either way, you will be building fine motor skills while also fostering creativity. 
A unit on dinosaurs hardly seems complete without talking a bit about fossils! The common way of using plaster of Paris to make hardened imprints seemed a bit daunting to me, particularly when I read through the warning label, not to mention the mixing, the mess, and a number of excited preschoolers involved in the process. For our dinosaur unit we made fossil imprints using baking soda clay. I simply made the clay the night before and left it in a sealed Ziplock bag. After reading our dinosaur book and talking about fossils in small group, each child was given a paper plate and a small ball of soda clay to flatten. Then they could choose from plastic dinosaurs to make footprints and/or large seashells to press in for a texture print. I also included a note explaining to parents that the clay needed to air dry at least overnight to harden to it’s “fossilized” state. (Hopefully, you can see the imprint in the picture above. If I had been thinking more about photography than preschool, I would have gone for a little more color interest here!)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “Music is the universal language of mankind.” It is a transcendent medium, one that takes on a variety of forms to meet the intrinsic needs of each person. It is enlivening and motivating. This we can all agree on. What has been debated in recent decades is the relationship of music to learning. Early studies presented the concept of the “Mozart Effect”, claiming that simply listening to Mozart made people (particularly applied to children) smarter. The study had shown enhanced performance on certain measures after a period of listening to Mozart. What followed was a firestorm of (good-intentioned as well as money-motivated) promoters of the idea that listening to music would make children smarter. Many began to believe that simply playing great musical works in the presence of infants and young children would boost their IQs and give them the fighting edge in the race to becoming the uber-brilliant brain child apparently desired the world over. 
