Painting with nature
The other day Ted went all round The garden collecting ‘bits of nature that look cool’, at the end he had a whole bucket full of stuff and no idea what to do with it. We’d been planning on doing some painting that afternoon any way so we thought why not do some nature painting! We came inside and picked out our paints, we decided to use Autumnal colours. Ted squeezed large blobs of paint directly on to some pieces of paper – not only does this make it easier to dip the items in the paint, It makes clean up easier too ( when we were done painting we actually folded the paper with the paint splats in half, opened them up and cut out some butterflies)!
We had so much fun using the natural objects to paint via printing and stamping and we even made our own cute paintbrushes by using an elastic band to attach leaves to a stick!
We used our leaves and sticks to create trees and our flowers to create, well.. flowers!
Ted loved this activity, we spent over an hour on it and we used it to talk about textures and colours using descriptive words. Ted enjoyed looking closely at all the natural objects and seeing all their different features such as the lines on the leaves and the star shapes of the purple flowers.
This activity is also a great opportunity to talk about plants and what they need to grow and also about what animals rely on plants and why. Why not give it a go?
*remember to check that the plants you are picking are safe to handle.