truck paint

M loves vehicles of all kinds - cars, trucks, buses, trains, etc.  As I've mentioned here before, he also loves painting.  We combined the two today, as seen on a number of blogs I've looked at over the past year.

We started with M choosing the colors he wanted to use.  We're working on color names so it makes for good practice.  He chose five colors today and I put them on the paper in globs.  M dove right in.  In fact, the activity was really half truck and half finger painting for us.

After I showed him how to use the trucks to make tracks he got into it.  I put out two trucks that I knew would be easily cleaned off.  A lot of our other trucks were too big or were matchbox type so I thought they'd be more difficult to clean off.  These worked great but only gave us one type of tracks...

Our final project was a mix of finger paint smears and tire tracks.  

I imagine it would be a fun thing to do with plastic animals if you could find some with distinctive footprints.  M liked it but it ended up being kind of a quick activity.  I think if we had had more vehicles or animals or toys to make different tracks it would have lasted longer.  We did end up doing two sheets and then had fun giving the trucks a bath :)

smoosh painting

This is a relatively quick and clean art activity.  Our finished smoosh paintings came out colorful and cute but M lost interest in this pretty quickly so we didn't cover the entire shapes.

I think this would be great with two or three year old who could appreciate the mixing colors.  Materials you need: paint, large ziploc bags (make sure they have a good zip), and paper shapes.  We used construction paper.

Put one shape in a bag with some paint.  We used two colors at a time because I could see putting all the colors in and having just turn brownish.  I put a good glob of each color but in retrospect I would add more paint.  Zip up the bag and get smooshing....

Here are before and after shots:

We did this project on the floor and M used his hands and feet to smoosh.  I would recommend trying to take the paper out of the bag as soon as you're done.  I ended up leaving our second one in a little longer and it was kind of stuck to the bag.  The best part of this activity was that there was virtually no clean up.  M did this in his whitest shirt and all I did at the end was throw the bags away.  Loved that part of it!