This month the toddlers explored how they could combine their love of painting with natural elements found outside. To start off the activities for the month, acorns were collected from our natural playground and brought inside to help make artwork. Throughout the fall the children had been loving collecting them and carrying them around the playground, so they were a great material to use as provocation. For the painting activity, a piece of paper was placed into a bin along with the acorns. Each child was then prompted to choose between two paint colours, either by pointing or verbally saying which colour they wanted to use. This worked on the children’s colour recognition and language skills. Once the child had selected their colour, and some was poured into the bucket, they were told to shake the bucket to move the acorns through the paint. It was great seeing the look of fascination and focus on the children’s faces as the used their gross motor skills to shake the bucket as hard as they could. When the children decided that they were done with the activity they simply stopped shaking it, which allowed for a child lead end to the painting.
The next material that caught the attention of the children was the leaves outside. One morning Audrey was seen laying in the leaves that had blown against our playground fence. This evolved into the children and educators working together to build leaf piles to play in, and when that was done leaves were brought indoors to continue the learning inside. The activity once again combined paint with our natural material of leaves. The children were given paint, a paintbrush, a piece of paper, and a leaf, to do open ended art in anyway that they wanted. Many of the children decided to use their paintbrushes to paint on the leaf or around it. Others, such Ayoub and Abby, chose to take more of a sensory exploration approach and used their fingers to paint the leaf.
For our last paint material of the month, pinecones were chosen to be used. Earlier in the month, and into last month, the children had been enjoying playing with pinecones both outside on the playground and in the sensory bin in the classroom. For this activity the children were given black and white paint along with a pine cone and a blank piece of paper. The children then used their fine motor skills to dip the pine cone into the paint and onto the paper. By doing this the children created an effect that was reminiscent of a snowy winter’s day. While the effect was visually appealing, the point of the activity was to allow the children the process of painting and creating. This was the same as with the other activities, as the toddler leaned that natural materials from outside can be made into art, and that paint could be a versatile medium outside of just using it with a paint brush. In the future we hope that the toddlers can continue this exploration and find new natural materials to paint with as the seasons continue to change.
