Fingerpainting fun

Today was such a beautiful day that I decided to try to get Kate outside as much as possible. She wanted to do something "crafty"so I set her up at her plastic picnic table with finger paints and paper. If you don't have an easily cleanable surface outside, I recommend buying an inexpensive shower curtain liner and placing it over a table or the grass! Kate took huge blobs of paint and rubbed them onto her hands before she began.


Today I only gave her the primary colors (red, yellow, blue) and told her to mix them two at a time to see what happened. She started with yellow and then added blue. She was surprised to see green start to appear. "Why does that happen, Mommy?" she asked. Of course another difficult question to answer...I thought about the technical answer dealing with light and pigment and then decided to say, "Because that is how color works. If you take two different colors and mix them they change into a new color." She seemed satisfied with this because she turned away and began to mix blue into the red.


We made orange, green and purple this way and Kate was es excited as ever that she now had the power to make new colors. She even realized that she was doing the same thing as Curious George in the book, Curious George The First Day of School. Luckily for me, she didn't make as big a mess as George.

Clean up was simple. Kate washed up in the sink, and I hosed down the picnic table.

If I had thought ahead, I would have put her in her bathing suit before she painted so I could just hose her down too. There is always next time!