Everybody loves paint. Aside, perhaps, from the parents of very well dressed children, but they can learn! Paint is never boring. It provides visual, tactile and olfactory sensory stimulation, it can be mixed, thrown, experimented with and can be used to transform the play space. Paint can be a play thing in itself or be a part of a larger creative and messy play. Today I thought I’d share a couple of my favourite paint based play ideas I’ve used in the playground.
Car Paint Shop
You know those orange and yellow fisher price cars which have been around forever? Well, they don’t have to be orange and yellow anymore! Here I set up a ‘workshop’ area using a tarp and some parachutes and just left the cars there with a bunch of paint. This went down incredibly well. Its messy, it uses something familiar and it allows a sense of getting-away-with-something. A bonus of this was towards the end of the day we took the cars out and turned it into a car wash activity with sponges, bubbles and plenty of water.
Moon Boots
Here I got hold of a bunch of big yellow car wash sponges and attached them to the bottom of different sized pairs of wellies with elastic. I wanted to create a sensory experience with paint that the children probably hadn’t experienced before. The sponges changed how they had to balance which gave it a challenge i hadn’t anticipated. I laid out trays of paint and let them get stuck in. Like the activity above this one had a sense of getting-away-with-something as they got to stand in paint and cover the playground with it.
Play Radical 