To continue our celebration of Earth day we created Earth-inspired pour painted rocks. Although we do all kinds of pouring in our classroom including pouring in the water and sand table, pouring our own juice at snack time, and even pouring glue for art – pour painting is a process that we hadn’t tried before…
Any kind of pouring that takes place involves the use of eye-hand coordination and the ability to judge when to stop and when to keep going but the nice thing about pour painting is that you really can’t get it wrong no matter how much or how little you pour…
To encourage the children to focus on “pouring” and not on “dumping” the paint, we encouraged the children to slowly pour the paint from the cups and to keep switching back and forth between colors until they had used up all of their paint. Here is how the process looked…
The children held a cup of paint high above the center of their rock, then slowly began pouring…
The children poured a small amount of their first paint color onto their rock then they chose their second color and began slowly pouring it in the center of their rock, on top of their first color…
The children alternated pouring their colors on top of each other until their rocks were covered and their cups were empty…
This process is wonderfully simple, yet the results are so beautiful! Â By alternating the colors that are poured, the paint is pushed down the rock, creating brilliant designs…
Pour painting requires a paint with the right consistency for pouring. In our case, we used a mixture of white water soluble, low odor house paint (that’s why the children had to wear paint smocks on this one) and tempera paint but the mess pretty much stayed contained in the box we used to hold our rocks…
Pour painting is also known as Tall Painting. Here is a video that I shared last year of Tall Painting (in case you haven’t ever seen it before)…
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Links to grow on:Â
Tall Painting, Tall Town: from Go Beyond the Classroom
Ketchup and mustard squeeze painting in preschool by Teach Preschool
Our “tall paintings” by Teacher Tom
Rainbow pour painted pots by Dilly-Dali Art