egg carton caterpillar

This is an oldie but a goodie so I'll keep it brief....

Take an old egg carton and cut it in half.  Turn it upside down and paint/decorate it.  We used our favorite Crayola paint:

Our My favorite part of painting these days is that we use one color at a time and M has to tell me the color word for the new color he wants to use.  His favorite colors are blue and red so even though he can say all the colors, he typically will tell me that everything is either blue or red - except when we're painting and he has a real reason to tell me the right color!

Anyway, let the caterpillar dry then add eyes and a pipe cleaner antenna :

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 :)