Those people who know me, know that I LOVE to paint and if I could have my way I would spend my days in an art studio churning out canvas after canvas (and occasionally sipping on champagne). As you can imagine looking after my children full time means that I don’t have very much time at all to paint however it always makes me so happy when my children ask me if they can paint pictures. I know that almost all children like to paint however I like to think that some of my love for art and all things creative has passed onto my little ones.

This week my children asked me if we could open up some of the new paints that I bought them and do some painting outside in the garden. Instead of standard painting with fingers and brushes I decided to introduce a new element to the activity and get them to do paint dipping and stamping.

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What you need:
• Paints in various colours
• Different sized shapes and containers for dipping and stamping (I used play dough cutters)
• Plates to put the paint on for dipping (I just used paper plates)
• Paper for stamping
• A painting drop sheet or newspaper to save your table top
• Aprons to help save your children’s clothes

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This activity is really easy, simply put a large dollop of each colour of paint on a different plate and encourage your children to dip the shapes into the various colours and stamp them onto paper.

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You can help them refine their spatial awareness but showing them how some shapes are larger than others and how the smaller shapes can fit inside the larger ones. I let my children use one of their sets of plastic stacking cups to try and stamp concentric circles on the paper.

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Another really nice thing about dipping the shapes into the paint is that the colours inevitably get mixed and so all of a sudden they go from 4 basic colours to many, many more. Mixing colours is one of my 4 year olds favourite things to do with paint and it is great for her vocabulary to teach her words like magenta instead of pink and aqua instead of blue or green. Inevitably though after many rounds of mixing you will end up with brown!

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This turned out to be a really fun arts and crafts activity this afternoon.