Cork Painting

Saw Cork Painting on the Frugal Family Fun website and wanted to give it a try! We always raid our paper/cardboard recycling bin when it's time to paint. For this project we opened up some granola bar boxes so they'd lay flat. First Q painted with purple and I just gave her the cork and let her explore. She used it like a paintbrush to drag all around her paper.

Then I did some stamping with my own cork and had her watch me. She was very interested and liked my flowers! So I used the hand-over-hand technique to show her how to do her own stamping. She tried it a few times (last picture) and then asked for a paintbrush, so I got her one!

I try to expose her to all different types of painting tools. She usually ends up asking for a paintbrush, which is okay, too!

On the website the suggested using this technique to make wrapping paper. I am going to cut my flowers out to make some cards. This is a very fun activity and I can see lots of neat projects that could come from this, using the circle shape of the cork to stamp....rainbows, fish. etc.....

On an educational note, it is great for children to use real objects for stamping because it teaches them the properties of geometric solids (cylinders, spheres, rectangular prisms, cubes, etc.) When stamping with a cork (cylinder), the child learns that the cork has two faces in the shape of circles. Next time I might add a small box or a some dice to the stamping activity so that Q can begin to learn that cubes are made up of faces in the shapes of squares! For older children, you might ask them to predict what shape the object will make when you stamp it before actually doing the stamping, and then try it to see if they are right!! Can they find any other objects in the house that will stamp circles???