During the month of April we have been experimenting with paint and texture. How can we make paint feel different, what can we add to paint to achieve this goal?
The toddlers are always enjoying a good textured activity and painting is one of their favourite activities. Caytlin started by mixing shaving cream and paint, to create a 3D effect when the children are painting. Once their art was dried out, it felt “puffy and bumpy” as Kairo said.
To continue with our goal, we then mixed food colouring into our glue to make it colourful! Monique commented, “I like the green one!” Lana then agreed with Monique. Zachary requested the blue glue, and said “sticky!” Amanda added, “that’s right it’s sticky glue, it looks like paint but it’s not. “Glue,” Zach repeated. The toddlers quickly understood that although it looked like paint, it was in fact glue. Julia felt the stickiness of the glue and showed Amanda her sticky finger, “glue,” she said. “Sticky glue,” Amanda replied. We also added recycled newspaper to stick it onto the glue. Kairo then approached the table and said, “wow, this is nice Amanda!” It was a colourful way to get creative while exploring the sticky texture of the glue. “Sticky, sticky, sticky glue, glue, glue,” sang Henry Y and Victoria.
Finally, the toddlers were invited to experiment more with glue paint as they explored an animal footprints activity. The children were given a variety of animal and dinosaur figurines as well as a big tray of glue paint in different colours. Many of the children were eager to participate and jumped right in, picking out an animal and dipping the feet into the paint. Before long, there was paint all over the children’s hands which created a messy sensory play experience. Monique even had the idea to add our own handprints! Although it was sticky paint that didn’t stop us from exploring. During this activity, the toddlers engaged in some animal recognition, parallel play, and sensory exploration.
We had the opportunity to create different textured paint by first using shaving cream, and then glue, and mixing either paint or food coloring into each observing how ratio works as we mixed each colour to a primary colour being white and waiting to see what the outcome would be. We created lighter shades of paint as well as new colours. The children enjoyed exploring the colour theory as well as texture. Perhaps we can add sand into our paint next to make it sandy!
