Pirate handprints and paper plates

We managed to get outside and play today as no rain and hurricane force gales – yay!!!!

This afternoon after a good run round in the garden we made pirate handprints. If you read my blog regularly you will know I love handprints – anything can be made out of handprint with a bit of imagination and they are fantastic to keep and look back on.

This was a slightly trickier one as it involved painting the kids hands three different colours – if you have ever painted your hand you will know that it really tickles and you automatically want to close your hand, so this took the two of us, one holding kids hands and the other doing the painting!

We painted 3/4 of the palms a peachy skin colour (orange mixed with lots of white paint!), the 1/4 of the palm by the wrist red and the thumb red, and the rest of the fingers black.

Once the handprints had dried, I added black stripes to the red bit to make a pirate bandanna, and an eye patch, eye and mouth.

We used the left over peachy coloured paint to paint a paper plate. Again the top part was painted red and black as a bandana, and red and mouth added afterwards.

What do you think mi hearties?

Chinese New Year: dragons, fans and lanterns

We did a couple of things today for our Chinese new year wall today, mostly involving lots of red, yellow and orange paint!

First of all we did some lovely Chinese dragons using our handprints. We painted our hands red and did some sidewards handprints on white paper and did the same over the top with orange and yellow paint. Once they had dried we cut it out and stuck it to red paper, adding legs and head made out of paper.

To save on washing up paint trays, (yes I’m lazy!) we used paper plates for the paint. The paint had all swirled together and looked really pretty – far too pretty to throw away – so we turned the plates into fans! We spread the paint over the entire plate and then pressed the plate to a sheet of paper. This left a lovely print on the paper (which we used in our next activity!) and left a marbly type effect on the plate. We left the plates to dry and cut them in half and then the kids decorated them with black felt tips.

Using the print off the plate, we made a lantern. Once the print had dried we cut it out and stuck it to red paper, adding detail to the top and bottom with black felt tip.

Our Chinese wall is looking great!