Have Fun Painting In The Rain

It’s been a rainy day here on the Isle of Wight, and we’ve been spoiled by some of the good weather we’ve had recently. With the children up from before 6 this morning, we’d already had a fairy tea party and watched a movie by 11am and I didn’t feel I had the strength to keep them indoors all day. Instead we pulled on the wellies and rain gear and went painting in the rain.

We took a variety of paints and materials: we took paper, watercolour paint, poster paint and chalks as well as paintbrushes and cotton wool.

It was a fun, if soggy experiment and the girls had a fantastic time:

Painting with watercolours

We fished the watercolour discs out of the box, and used them without brushes, just moving them around on the paper with our hands – then with brushes too.

Cheap watercolours like these are good for this project!*

Painting with poster paints

Blobs of poster paints spread over the paper using cotton wool and brushes – it was a great lesson for the girls in being gentle, since the wet paper easily tears.  We also added blobs of paint, then stuck the pictures to the wall, letting the paint run down in a free-style of patterns.

Try these washable poster paints for yourself*

Painting with chalks

The wet chalks didn’t transfer too well on to wet paper, so we decided to change the canvas to the floor, where I drew pictures for the girls to colour in.

• Try these extra large sidwalk chalks

And finally, playing in the rain, drawing on the floors? You have to include a bit of hopscotch.

This is a great way for little ones to learn shapes too, as I had my 3 year old call out the names of the shapes she was standing in. Adjust the ‘tasks’ to their ages – so my 5 year old was counting jumps, how many sides each shape has and so on. And in the end, just let them have fun, jump, and play, burn off energy and enjoy the fact that the rain this time of year isn’t entirely freezing!

Try different paints and see how they react in the water!

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