Friday, May 29, 2009

Fun With Kool-Aid Fingerpaint


We whipped up a batch of watercolor paints last night, but they were still drying after lunch, and we were ready for some art. We left the watercolors to dry, and opted for a fast finger paint recipe instead. The Kool-Aid playdough had been a big hit, so we decided to give Kool-Aid finger paint a try to.

The recipe we found the recipe, here, at suite101.com, mixes together water, oil, salt, flour, and unsweetened Kool-aid to form a sweet smelling glop. It's not so much paint, as it is thin playdough (or maybe thick slime), but it smells great, and it provides for a lot fun texture exploration.

There are quite a few finger paint recipes online that call for cornstarch and food coloring, and have to be cooked on the stove. These generally turn out more like the store bought variety of finger paint, but they take a little longer to make, and don't smell quite as nice.

The children enjoyed squishing the glop between papers, making print patterns. They also liked etching out designs on the paint covered pages, and then erasing them by smoothing the paint back out. I covered the table in black garbage bags, and gave them the paint on paper plates, so the cleanup was fairly simple. It wasn't the serious art the older children were hoping for, but they enjoyed it almost as much as the little ones, and now our whole house smells like a lollipop.

It's great to be a homeschooler.



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