It’s finally feeling like fall, and to celebrate we brought out the watercolours and painted some (paper) leaves to create a colorful collaborative collage.
The walls of our meeting room are scratched and scuffed, so I found a large piece of poster paper, and invited the children to paint leaves, cut them out, and glue them to the poster paper to make a collage for our wall! The idea of having their artwork up on display was very exciting, and the kids eagerly set to work. My hope is to come up with a variety of different group art activities that the kids can work on together, and to keep adding to the meeting room walls. We’re going to turn those boring walls into an art gallery!
Some tips for painting with kids – watercolors are your friend. They dry quickly, and are easy to wipe clean from most surfaces, though if you’re concerned about staining, you can lay down a protective layer of newspaper or a cheap plastic table cloth first. I put small amounts of water out in little plastic lidded snack containers for kids to clean their brushes with, and we only had one spill, which was easily cleaned up with the stack of paper towels I had brought along.
Not every space is suitable for messy process art, but it’s absolutely worth giving a shot if you have the time, space and ability. The children had an absolute blast creating works of art for the entire program, with little to no input from me – the only problem I had was that I ran out of templates, and had to ask a colleague to make some extra copies for me, because the kids were painting so many leaves!
Have you tried painting with kids at your library? Do you have any tips you’d share?