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I take a piece of orange-colored paper and I have an egg container with me since they are both paper with different thicknesses. I am not sure what I want to make out of these yet but by touching the paper and egg container, I feel the egg container is harder but easy to tear apart, while the orange paper is thinner but if I want to take shape out of it I will need to cut it. I think it is magical that paper can be in different forms for different uses in arts.

I cut the paper in half because I think it is easier to make something on it. When I was cutting it I feel the paper move with my scissor, the sounds it made when I was cutting it shows that the paper is a firm material, it bends as I cut it.

The egg container is made of paper, it is easy to tear apart, so I choose to tear it into small pieces by hand, the shape looks like a flower or a small container.

The small pieces can be flowers so I use glue to paste them on the paper. As I put glue on it, it applies well on the surface and works well for pasting.

Since I decide to make it look like a garden, I need to paste some leaves on the paper as well, when I am pasting the leaves, it is not as easy as I did pasting with the egg container, the surface of the leaves doesn’t apply well with the glue, it shows the characters of the paper that it is easy to apply the glue and paste.

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Paper becomes receptive, reactive, pliant, absorbent, and responsive to touch, bending, folding, and crumpling. Even if these movements are minor, working with paper requires constant mobility in which one joins forces with the material and reacts to its tendencies (Pacini-Katchabaw, Kind & Kocher 2016). Just as Pacini-Ketchabaw said, our thinking influences the material world just as much as the material world influences our thinking. The characteristics and liveliness of the materials themselves move us and inspire our actions. While I am experimenting with the papers, the movement and the shape of the paper made me think about making a garden out of these materials, so I draw black lines under the “flowers”, making it looks like soil.

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The name of this artwork is “My Beautiful Garden”. I have always wanted to use simple materials such as paper to describe landscapes or objects because I understand that visual arts use spatial, symbolic, and visual methods to convey meaning (Roy, Baker & Hamilton 2015). The artwork uses paper to simulate plants and landscapes, showing our most commonly used material paper which can also be used to simulate and create things in real life. Through different movements of paper, such as cutting, pasting, and drawing, the artwork fully demonstrates the value of paper as a work of art, paper as a material has its magic in arts. It perfectly shows that we are participants in a dynamic materials world. The way we think responds to and moves along with the fluxes and flows of the materials we work with. As we began to "think through" the paper, it began to "think in us." (Pacini-Katchabaw, Kind & Kocher 2016). I can invite children to make a similar artwork like this so that they can feel the movement of the paper while learning about the garden, flowers, and sunlight and improve their awareness of taking care of the environment and plants.

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I have a piece of paper and some colourful tissue paper. I want to cut the paper into a shape, so I decide to cut the paper into a cloud shape and use tissue paper to decorate my cloud. Then I apply glue to the paper. I make some tissue paper into balls and paste it onto the paper, while I am pressing the tissue paper with my fingers I can feel the movement of the paper, I paste the little balls on my cloud and use some flat ones to paste around it.

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The special texture of paper materials makes them have strong plasticity. Changing the shape of paper materials such as cutting, applying glue, and folding makes me feel the movement of the paper as I am doing it. In addition, paper materials have a variety of textures, which can meet various manual purposes and achieve different artistic effects, the cloud I made is made from thicker paper while the tissue paper is thinner and easier to paste and change its shape.

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Paper materials are the most widely used raw materials in children's handicrafts today and children can be invited to make this artwork. Most young children like to make handicrafts because it provides a window that can show young children's self-ideas. Due to its special physical properties, paper materials can be used as handmade raw materials to successfully express children's ideas and intentions, and help children stimulate creativity in the process of handmade. Through the production of this artwork, children can express their own ideas, while training their hands-on ability, imagination, and creativity.

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I have a large piece of paper and a few paints. Now I am thinking about doing a painting with yellow, red, and blue paints. I use a paint roller and paint yellow colour, as I put the paint on the paper I can feel how the roller rolls the paint onto the paper. To make my painting more colourful, I decide to use blue and red paint on my artwork as well. When I am painting red colour in a wavy shape I can feel the paint on the paper go smoothly and the paper absorbs the paint well. Now I have filled the paper with different colours I want to spread the colour so I use a roller and spread the rest of the paint on the paper, as I am spreading it, I can feel the paper absorbs the paint and the colour dries quickly.

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The paper itself has strong coloring power, which can quickly present children's paintings.

According to Loris Malaguzzi, one of the founders of Reggio Emilia's schools for young children, drawing, and painting are experiences and explorations of life, the senses, and meanings. They express urgency, desires, reassurance, research, hypotheses, readjustments, constructions, and inventions. They provide interpretations and intelligence about what is going on around us (Pelo 2016).

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Painting, as a kind of children's handwork, plays an important role in improving children's aesthetics.  I can teach children about patterns by painting on paper, and then provide children with paper to give them enough space for self-play to paint freely on paper. To let children do graffiti freely is essential to let them fully perceive the information left by brushes and paints on the white paper, and fully mobilize their senses of vision, hearing, movement, etc. So children can acquire underlying knowledge such as form (line, shape, color) and emotion.

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I have a huge ball of playdough and thinking of making dumplings out of it. I tear it off into small pieces, as I am doing it, I can feel the softness of the playdough and how easy to make it into different shapes as I wish. I then use my palm to press each piece of playdough, making them flat and easy to make different shapes. I start by making a few small dumplings and in the end, I combine the rest of the playdough and make a huge dumpling. When I am curling the edge of the large piece of playdough I feel the movement of it, the playdough is very flexible and soft, with my fingers pressing and rolling onto it, it becomes the shape of the dumpling that I want.

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Playing playdough can exercise children’s fine motor skills. When children play with colored playdough, they can use various actions to operate the colored playdough, such as pinching, squeezing, pressing, kneading, poking, rubbing, cutting, etc., which can exercise children's hand muscles and flexibility. The plasticity of the playdough is extremely strong, and it can change its shape immediately after pressing it lightly. It can help children learn cause and effect, and gain a sense of control and self-confidence. Muscle is required for creating artwork out of playdough. Children work with playdough in their hands and feel it on their skin. When working with playdough, they develop an intuitive understanding of its fluidity and substance through repeated interactions (Pelo 2016).

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Playing with playdough can enhance the cognitive ability of children's brains and it is good for children's spatial cognition and brain growth. Spatial cognition is the ability to visualize three-dimensional objects. Children can easily imagine and manipulate spatial information in their minds. Playdough is not only soft in texture and varies in shape, but also in many colors. It can enrich children's imagination through brain thinking exercises.

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I have always wanted to create a song that includes all the months. In order to include all the names of the month in the song, the song needs to be slow-paced and each word needs to be sung clearly. Therefore, I apply a catchy tune of a classic song and fill it in with the name of the month.

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Music and speech, as the two main representational forms of auditory information, are both composed of time-expanded consecutive events, and their phonological characteristics are represented by the same parameters such as pitch, time course, and loudness. Therefore, scholars believe that music and language share specific neural mechanisms and thus have carried out research on the relationship between music and language learning. Studies have found that music learning in rhythm, singing, melody, etc., can increase children's vocabulary and lay the foundation for future language and expression skills (Hanna 2016).

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When children sing, clap, play instruments, and move to music, they are engaging in functional musical play. Children naturally embody their musical creations through movement and drama. Children could improvise and produce loosely structured musical pieces even without formal instruction. (Hanna 2016). I can invite children to sing along the song, in this way, they can learn how to say each month by the movement of the tune and lyrics of this song. The catchy lyrics help children to remember all the names as well.

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I am thinking of making some musical sounds. So I choose to use glasses of different levels of water. I have a glass full of water, a glass with water half full, and an empty glass. I use a spoon trying to see if the sounds made by these three glasses are different. I use the spoon to hit on each glass to make a beautiful tune.

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Music is an important carrier for exercising hearing because the rich timbre, clear rhythm, and beautiful melody of music are closely related to children's hearing. Listening to more music can improve children's ability to distinguish sounds.  Music promotes children's imagination and makes children's imagination richer and more open. Whether a musical work is a song or a piece of music, it is all figurative, it revolves around a theme and depicts a certain image. After the image is felt and understood by the children, it gives them wings of imagination (Hanna 2016).

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Children's musical expressions as they learn how to use these tools include chanting, singing, dancing, listening, composing, and playing instruments. A child's hearing is at the most sensitive stage of life. I can invite children to listen to the tune I made, by deep listening, children can develop their musical skills, which is good for their brain as well.

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Through exploring different materials, I have learnt that each material has its own unique way of movement and way of expression. It is fascinating and I believe applying these different materials to early childhood education is an important part to inspire children to think and learn in different ways.

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I will use different materials to create my own artwork to explore each material's movements and think about how to apply this to early childhood education.