Monday, October 10, 2011

Nature Paintings

The other week we took a short nature walk.  We pushed our small wooden doll carriage along with us and filled it with all sorts of natural items we found along our walk.  We found twigs, large sticks, twigs with leaves attached, leaves, acorns, rocks and even bark from a tree. (it had fallen off the tree)


When we came back to the classroom we literally just dumped our collection into the empty sensory table to explore.  Several days later one of the little guys in my room brought some leaves inside from the playground and asked to put them "in".  Of course, those leaves were plopped inside the sensory table as well.


The children explored these items a bit, but weren't thrilled with them (I think they may have found them 'out of place' in the classroom).  Over the weekend, I grabbed some tiny pumpkins and gourds to add to the table. 


We decided it was high time we explore painting with our Autumn items.  We pulled out the pumpkins, the gourds, the leaves (some that were by now, quite dry) some twigs with leaves attached, rocks and acorns.


We added orange, red and yellow  paint in shallow containers and began to explore.  The adults modeled how to make pumpkin "prints" by holding the tiny pumpkins by the stem and dipping them in paint. 


We explored dipping leaves and acorns in paint and swirling and tapping them on the paper.  We spent time exploring each object and how it interacted with the paint.  Later we may add some of our colored glue to stick items down.  We may also decide to use paintbrushes to actually paint directly on the pumpkins!  But, for now, we explored using these items as paintbrushes themselves!


We'll be off on another nature adventure later this week.  I can't wait!  Oh, did I tell you.  We found a snake on our first walk!  We were quite excited, though it was too fast to take a picture of!

This blog post is linked to the blog hop on Rainbows Within Reach

2 comments:

  1. Hey, Pam,
    This sounds like fun, both the nature walk, and the paiting.
    Fall is a great time for nature walks, with the colours and smells.
    Hope you have another lovely walk this week too.
    I enjoyed your post!
    Brenda

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Brenda- thanks for stopping by! This was great fun. We now have a sensory table full of nature items to explore while inside- and of course, we're collecting more on each walk!

    ReplyDelete

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