Paint, paint, paint

I should know better, I really should.
As my colleague at “A Classroom Full of Curiosity and Wonder” likes to tell me, I’m the artsy-fartsy one.  I should know about paint by now.

Today we started with a beautiful provocation in the art studio.  Fall colours of paint, mixed with soap thank goodness, and a variety of fall harvest fruits and vegetables to print with.  I demonstrated how to use the fruits and vegetables to print and how each one could be used several times before needing to be re-inked.  The children were eager to get going and could barely contain their enthusiasm; this was the first time we’d put out paint this year!

They started using the materials and everything was predictable… at first.

And then things started to get interesting.

In the end, they decided to use their fingers to make prints and use the vegetables and fruit to scrape away the layers of paint.  Several children went home more multi-coloured than they came to school.  I should know better by now that there is always this experimentation phase when you introduce a new material.  Children always need time to feel the material, to find out what it can do, and to play with it before they can use it as a medium of self-expression.  One drop of paint at a time!