Section: Painting

Explore mark making on a large scale with spray bottles and chalk paint.

The girls enjoy drawing outside with chalks however this always leads to loads of broken pieces of chalk. We had been saving up all these bits of chalk and crushed them further into a powder, before adding some water to turn them into a liquid mixture. I then remembered the spray bottles that we picked up from the 99p shop a few weeks ago and thought that these could be a fun way to explore the new paint. We took them in the garden as I wasn't sure how good there aim was going to be as they practised using the bottles! My three year old thought it was great fun spraying her pink 'paint' everywhere and I had to keep reminding her to watch where it was spraying (and to avoid her sister!). My little one wasn't able to make the bottle spray the paint but enjoyed walking around the garden saying 'splish splish' and waving her bottle around.

What we used:

• broken chalks
• water
• spray bottles

This activity is good for:

• fine manipulative skills - pushing and squeezing the trigger to make the bottle spray
• exploring colour
• creative development
• observing changes which occur as water is added
• using positional language
• making marks