With all the beautiful colours that have popped up around the forest this spring, we’ve been taking inspiration from the gorgeous flowers and bright sunshine by experimenting with some water colour painting! The children in the Morden Forest have consistently shown interest in painting and drawing what they see in the environment around them; we love to use many different mediums and see the preferences each child develops.
Using our water colour paints has been a lovely way of encouraging delicate motions and strokes with the brushes, as the children demonstrate using the brushes ‘lightly’ or ‘firmly’. Using such little brushes has also been great practice for their fine motor skills; holding the brushes in different ways to find what is most comfortable and, with some guidance from the educators, which way would give them the most precision. The educators encourage the children to let the brush dance on the page “like a ballerina on their tiptoes”. Seeing the children use these techniques and develop these skills has been wonderful! “I can draw teeny-tiny leaves in my garden!”
This is an activity that the children have been asking to continue with a lot this week; so, each day we have added something new to the activity. One morning the children used stencils to paint over and reveal their prints. Another morning, we had one of our forest posters set up with letters of the alphabet, numbers and days of the week for the children to play fun games with and practice the shapes of our letters “I can find all the sounds in my name!”. We’re excited to incorporate more water colour use in different activities in future!
Have a lovely weekend all!
Little Forest Folk
Morden