Invisible Color Painting: Shapes!

Mom life is hard. ESPECIALLY when you have a no-fear, active, rambunctious, little toddler boy! Boy moms you know you can relate ;) !

I make it my goal to provide my little one with as many fun and engaging activities as possible and today's was no different. Amidst melt-downs, screaming for snacks and begging to go outside in the 115 degree heat, I needed an activity that would engage him AND connect with whatever book he was craving.

(If you don't know my son he is ALL about books. My kid practically BREATHS books and I'm not complaining).

Today he chose to carry around Little Red Penguin Colors AND Little Red Penguin Shapes. He loves lifting the flaps on each page and pointing to the shape or color underneath! He is so engaged in these books right now I just HAD to plan our activity to scaffold his learning. Now we've done the normal finding shapes around the house, or coloring a picture black, blue green, etc. Stryder and I both needed something a little more exciting and different.

Well, flash-back to my days in college coming up with lesson plans for toddlers and I remembered learning about invisible paint! Invisible you say, what's that?! Well here is the fun part for us parents.... Ready you won't believe it... it's water... That's right just water!

It's a wonderful and relatively mess free way to teach the concept of colors.

Materials:

- Colored construction paper

- Water color paintbrush

- Tape (to tape paper to table if needed)

- Water

- Paint pot

Process:

- Take a piece of colored construction paper (Stryder chose black of all colors but hey if that's what he wants!)

- Cut it into the shape you are learning about or your toddler wants (circle, square, star etc)

- Put some water in a paint cup (don't fill it up too much we don't want to saturate the paper)

- Give the paint cup and a water color paint brush to your toddler

- tape the shape paper down and watch your child have fun!

The best part is watching the excitement as the water vanishes (dries up)! To them it really does look like invisible paint!

Stryder and I enjoyed talking about how he was putting invisible paint on the black circle! We discusses how putting his paint brush on the paper made the color black and other such conversation starters to get his mind working. So instead of doing the normal color the circle black we had an already black circle where we could either put "black magic paint" on or "invisible paint". There are so many ways you can adjust this activity to suit the interests and needs of your child!

He had so much fun and we had the book handy to point to the shape in the book as well. Let's just say it didn't end with the "black circle" and we had to use invisible paint on a variety of other colors and shapes! This activity was educational, fun and interactive which is just what Stryder needed. It also focuses more on the "process" over the "product" which teaches him that it's about trying and working hard, not necessarily what the product looks like when you are done. To clean up you simply dump the water out of the paint pot and you are ready to go! Put the finished product on the wall for a fun color and shape display.

Go ahead and try it out. I'm sure it will be a great hit with your kiddos as well!!

#Books #Toddlers #Crafts #UsborneBooksMore #Shapes #Colors