Setting up the Den room before the children arrive is an important job, as it ensures activities are ready to be explored by the children throughout the day. Today I prepared a painting activity; I popped sheets of paper on our easels, poured paint into paint pots and had brushes at the ready, waiting for our children to get involved. However, not many of them did. This made me think the activity wasn’t enticing enough; I took another look at it and thought about how I could make it more exciting for the children.
I thought back to the previous week, and interests the children had, one of these being finger painting in the garden on the easel, so I decided to extend this further! I cleared a big space on the floor indoors along with help from a few of the children. I was inundated with questions such as “what are you doing?” and “what is that for?” as they saw me sticking big sheets of paper to the floor, intrigued as to what I could possibly be doing.
They watched on as paint pots were placed onto the floor, and a big bowl of soapy water. One little girl noticed there were no paint brushes to use, “where are the brushes?” she asked, I asked the children what we could use as an alternative, after a little thinking; “our hands!!” they said, so off they went dipping their hands into the paint and pushing them onto the paper.
Another little girl made the brilliant suggestion of painting her feet and we sat down and carefully painted them together. She walked across the paper with her arms outstretched to control her balance, as the paint made the surface slippery. “Look! The colours are mixing together!” one little boy pointed out, this encouraged the children to explore the changes in colour together, talking about the colours they had created simply by walking across the paper.
We gradually added different materials to create even more patterns on the paper, a few of the children wanted to use the sponges to paint their hands, whereas others wanted to use pinecones to create a different pattern altogether.
This was a brilliant activity to encourage communication between the children, and for them to explore their own creativity and imagination. A lot of Star Wars and Paw Patrol characters were created today!
Thanks for reading!
Soph