So funny how some days work out. With a dragging mom after a DC Metro Moms night out, and with three runny-nosed kids and another rainy day, we brightened our afternoon with rainbow paints, mixed-up colors, and color carving.
Here’s the interesting progression:
- Rainbow Paints: Maddy wanted to do some watercolors, but since we were out of them, we tried an amazing bunch of new Crayola paints. These are the 6-Count Washable Kids’ Paint, and, like all of the Crayola products we know and love, they really are safe for kids and really are washable. Woo-hoo!
I covered the table with newspaper, smocked the kids, and put a blob of each color on a paper plate for Maddy, Owen, and Cora. Then they got to work. They just painted. And experimented. And added water, then changed brushes. Then added more water and tried a new brush. They made globs and blobs. And lines and spots. Happy faces and triangles. And then we mixed colors.
- Color Mixing: We tried our hand at mixing colors once Maddy finished all of her orange and I asked her to use the colors on her ‘palate’ to make more orange on her own. We talked about which two colors together might make orange, and her guess was correct–yellow and red.
I showed her how to take a bit of each to make orange, then she did it on her own. And so our mixing extravaganza began. We mixed blue and yellow to make green, then red and blue to make purple. These paints totally rock for mixing and blending, the colors are so true. Owen got in the mix. And then Cora tried her hand at it, and we were a mixing bunch of fools. Everyone’s paper plate palate was a big, thick, mass of color. So we started carving.
- Color Carving: I grabbed some Popsicle sticks, and I showed the kids how to use them to carve out pictures on their plates. I wrote “Owen” on his plate, then he tried. He made circles and wrote his name. Maddy wrote her name and then made hearts and zig-zags, and Cora made tiny dots on hers. We took turns drawing pictures and guessing what they were, writing letters and numbers and funny faces.
And then Cora dumped her water on her plate, Owen thought it was funny and dumped his on his plate, and I called “clean-up!” before our kitchen was afloat in paint and wet newspaper.
Thank goodness everything was washable. . . and thank goodness for a little bit of learning and some runny rainbow paint on another rainy Tuesday.
