Marshmallow Painting

Autumn, my favorite season. So bright, so colorful, so easy to do crafts around that theme! Evan received paint and a pad of large paper for his birthday and I've been dying to really use them. We had fun with this craft, especially because Grandma Deb arrived minutes before we sat down to paint.

Supplies needed: white paper; red, yellow, green & brown paint; paint tray; paint brushes;
marshmallows (not pictured); paint cover-up shirts or aprons

If you do not have brown paint, mix your own (it was harder than I remember from kindergarten) 

If you have younger kids, you may wish to prepare the tree trunk ahead of time. I did mine while my kids napped so that it had time to dry. I realized later how smart that was because when they did the leaves, the brown did not mix with the other colors.

No need to be perfect (clearly). A simple tree with ample branches is fine.

Hand them a marshmallow and let them go to town. I wanted Evan to follow my instructions (practice in listening and obedience/following instructions) by stamping only and not smearing the paint around. But with Reese being only 23 months, I just let her freestyle.

Not seen in the pictures above is Grandma Deb who arrived just as we were sitting down to paint. It was nice to have an extra pair of hands for this messy craft!

One last tip, I turned their trees upside-down so they didn't have to reach as far to put leaves at the top of the tree. This worked great! If you use a huge piece of paper like we did you may want to do the same?

Leaf crafts are common this time of year, probably because they work as an avenue to teach so many things:

1. Colors: you can practice the basic colors or  introduced mixing two colors to make a third. We did this with red and yellow making orange. I waited to prepare the colors until they were at the table, and I took advantage of needing to mix our own colors to show Evan how it worked. By the way, I learned the hard way that you need waaaaaay more yellow than red to make orange.
2. Seasons: review time, the seasons, the month, etc
3. God's faithfulness: every year we know God keeps the seasons in their time. Ecclesiastes 3 and Jeremiah 5 both have verses that mention God's power and control of the seasons*.
4. Counting: Keep track of the leaves, for older kids, make a graph after painting to document the number of red leaves vs the green and yellow and so on
5. Shapes: If you use a stamp (in our case a marshmallow) then review the shape
6. Patterns & Active Listening: Tell your student which order to a series of colors, or one at a time direct him on the next color, adjust for age appropriateness

And now I have two beautiful paintings to decorate my walls!

*I believe we should always read the Bible in their greater context. However, I think this is one of the few exceptions because these verses clearly mention God's power over creation. Even though these short phrases occur in the middle of a larger context, I am not changing the meaning of that larger context of scripture by only pointing out the part about God's power.