Foam Paint Fun!

When was the last time you used Colorations Foam Paint in your classroom?  This paint is so much fun, children never get tired of it no matter how many times you bring it out.  Here's the way I set it up for a group of 4 year olds.

Here we are using Foam Paint to decorate the cover of Paper Bag Books, which we had made the week before. Here I am introducing the idea to everyone, you can see how engaged they are.

Foam paint is so inviting, children are always eager to get started. Of all the paints I use with children, foam paint is one I can bring out again and again with any age child and they never get tired of it. There's something magical about watching brightly colored foam spritz out of a can and pile up high on a plate! It even makes noise as you spritz in out onto a paper palette, it is the ultimate sensory experience!

Sometimes I pass out large bristle brushes and sometimes we use paper towel rags to apply the paint.   Here you see four year olds applying foam paint with large chubby brushes.  You can see the white crayon scribbles underneath the paint, if you look at the finished book on the tabletop.
 

And here you see a 3 year old boy applying foam paint with a paper towel. He is using the paper towel as a "painting rag" instead of using a brush. Either paper towel rags or large chubby brushes works fine, and I suggest you try both ways at different times. After all, when you vary how you apply paint, you stimulate new problem solving and a variety of different fine motor skills.

Here's the finished result from the 3 year old class. In this particular application, the children were working on "Rainforest Paintings." They used large write crayons to first put down lines that represented rain (scribbles, dots and stripes) then patted foam paint on top with their paper towel rags. We used foam paint that represented the colors of the rainforest. Then, for the final layer, we used Liquid Watercolor in bingo bottles to create rain "splashes" on top. The foam paint gives these paintings wonderful color and texture. For an introduction on how to use foam paint, view the video clip below. Thanks for checking in!

MATERIALS YOU WILL NEED:

Colorations Foam Paint, set of all 7 colors - BFPSET
Triangular Chubby Brushes- TRIBRU
Large White Crayons - 12PCWH



More X-Ray Handprints!

I just got back from the California AEYC Conference where I delivered workshops on “Art, Literacy & Brain Development.” The handouts from those workshops are posted here (you'll see them on the right sidebar) for you to view or print out. To prepare for the workshops I taught several literacy based art lessons to a variety of children in classrooms that varied from ages 3-5. It was fun leading children through messy art ideas that had a literacy connection, and once again I included the X-Ray Handprint in some of the lessons. These photographs were taken from a Kindergarten class, and the video clip shows a wonderful close-up of a child doing the final phase of scraper art, which reveals her handprints. Take a look!

So many of the conference attendees were excited to learn about X-Ray Handprints, so I decided to post these new photos here. See my previous post from Tuesday, Dec 14, 2010 for more X-Ray Art ideas, or find the complete lesson plan on page 44 in Smart Art 2 (MOREART).

It’s been a busy conference season so I’m a bit late on my monthly post. Thanks for waiting! If you sign up to be an Art and Creativity Blog subscriber, each new post will conveniently come to you as an email. That makes it super easy to get a stream of new art ideas for your classroom. Please subscribe today, you’d be doing me a favor by showing your support. Thank you!