KiKi's Art - Mosaic By Numbers

     During the last few weeks, I've been on several shopping sprees through the clearance sections of ChristianBook.com. One of these shopping sprees led to buying assorted mosaic sets for KiKi to complete as art projects. And as "math" time because they force him to match the number on the color key to the number on the art piece before placing a colored square in each position. This is a major step for him. The matching concept is something he's mastered, but he's not used to having to match numbers. Especially since the numbers themselves mean nothing to him, they're just complicated abstract symbols. Top that with the fact that some of the background colors vary from the color the kit expects you to place in that area (all the squares themselves are white to make the number stand out), and this is a very difficult and complicated task.

     For instance, in the lion below, you can see that the base area of the mane is colored with red squares (as was indicated by the number), but the background around those squares is reddish brown which made KiKi want to use brown instead of red.

     There was a large amount of frustration from him attempting to just match colors to the background rather than matching the numbers, but eventually he figured it out and had a 90% accuracy by the end of both the above pieces. In total, he spent over 2 hours working on the lion, and about 1 1/2 hours doing the hippo. But, in the end, he was satisfied with his work.

     This entire kit cost $4, and there are 10 more pieces for him to complete in the future. I kind of went overboard and ordered one copy of each of the mosaic kits they had on clearance, so with 4 different Veggie Tales kits in addition to the rest of this one, I'm really glad that this is something he ended up enjoying.