Warthog Art

One of the twins' favourite books now is called Warthog Paint. It's about these Warthogs who are bored on a rainy day and decide to paint a rainbow on their kitchen wall. The twins love it. And it teaches them how all colours can be made as long as red, yellow and blue exist.

They love the rhyme and they love the repetition. And they love the bits where the colours are 'accidentally' spilt causing other colours to be created.




















So, one afternoon when everyone was tired of their rambunctious play, I took out some paint, plastered some mahjong paper on the wall at the stairwell landing and gave them some paint brushes, paint and read them the book. They were supposed to be warthogs. And at the bits where the warthogs 'Splish, bend low!' and "Splash, stretch tall!', the twins gamely tried to do the same.




















But obviously, Evan's favourite part was to actually mix the colours together. And using a brush to do that was just too easy and obvious. So, it was a big mess as he plunged his hands into the bowls of paint.




















There was paint everywhere, on his hands, on his feet, in his hair and on the ground. Of course, some eventually landed on the paper but that wasn't much.





















As with all paint sessions with them, it ends up with one dark pool of colour mixed together and there was a water fight with gross paint water and them pretending to be warthogs. Hence, it was full circle back to rambunctious play again. But at least there was 15 minutes of quiet and lots of fun to be had.

I was telling someone that I'd been sitting on this post for a long time and hadn't written it. She reminded me that I should write about the benefits of making their play related to the book they were reading because that was language arts at its best. My retort was I had had enough of writing lesson plans in school and what she was suggesting sounded a little too much like writing a lesson plan; by the end of this session, children would be able to identify at least 2 of the 3 secondary colours that appear when the primary colours are mixed together. Children should also be able to state which 2 primary colours have to be mixed together to form which secondary colour.

Seriously?

And the thought bubble that formed was that's why I don't usually tell people what I want to blog about.

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