We were busy on Thursday so decided to do our craft today. I was looking for a craft to do this week and came across a cool idea for painting caterpillars. I loved the idea, especially since you are using different, and unusual objects to create the patterns. There is a lot of potential to do this with my Kindergarten class in the fall if we study monarch butterflies again this year. I thought I would do a test run with the girls today while daddy was cutting the grass.
The first thing we did was make the grass for the caterpillar. I love when you can get get kids painting with objects other than paint brushes. The idea of using plastic forks for grass is awesome (not my idea – found it on Education Ease). Eileen was even able to figure out how to do the grass by herself. We have bit of grass in the sky but lets just call it an abstract, she is only 2 years old!
Next we used empty applesauce containers to make the body of the caterpillar. To avoid wasting paint we painted the rims with a paint brush and then used them to make impressions on the paper. If I did this with a larger group I would put paint on small plates and they could just dip the containers in the paint.
Finally we used Q-tips to create faces, antenna and legs on our caterpillars. Kaitlyn was able to do this herself but Eileen needed a bit of help from Mommy. She proudly did the spots herself.
I definitely think this would be a great activity with a preschool or kindergarten class and will try it is some version with my class next year. I will probably use this when we study butterflies and then try some other art lessons using unique materials. I would then do a culminating project where they had to create their own original artwork using a variety of objects. I would provide a bin with materials and they would have to select which ones to use.
What would you put in the bin? What objects would create the coolest patterns? Comments encouraged!
Mommy's Lessons 