Painting with Balls

 

This week we used balls and marbles to paint. I rolled out a couple pieces of paper to cover the whole table and filled a large basin with paint mixed with water. I used two different sizes of marbles and some larger plastic balls that had flashing lights in them that went off when the kids hit them on the table. The idea was to have the kids grab the balls and roll them across the table to leave tracks. As usual this is not what happened in most cases.

This is the first activity I have done that left the kids no choice but to touch the paint if they wanted to participate (stamps, cars, sponges and brushes all have some surface area that they can touch that has no paint on it) At first the kids looked at me like I was crazy when I presented them with a bucket of paint covered balls but after I started playing with them some of them inched closer to the table. I had to hand out the first couple marbles as the kids were not willing to reach into the bucket but once I got the first couple kids going I took a step back to see what the kids would do.

 

 In some cases they never got past just holding a paint covered marble and then going to wash their hands.  A couple kids just wanted to empty the marbles one at a time out of the bucket onto the table. Some kids did roll the balls across the table (as the track marks on the floor showed.) and some of the kids got really into the idea of touching the paint and just finger painted on the paper.  We even had some kids who never touched the paint or the paper but they stood close to the table and watched what was going on.

After I introduced the first couple kids to the activity I left them to it. More kids came to the table but I left it to kids already painting to show them what to do. We ended up with blue paper, blue tables, blue floors, and blue kids but it was fun.