Green Fingerpaint Exploration

From now until St. Patrick's Day, Kingston and I will be doing a series of activities and crafts in celebration of the holiday! My little red-headed Burke may look super Irish, but he is such a combination. Between Todd and I, we are a little bit of everything! If you can believe it, K actually gets his sweet red hair from the Italian side. Regardless, he makes the cutest little leprechaun I ever did see!

We started today with the simplest of simple crafts for baby - fingerpainting! Besides our Many Colored Days  craft, Kingston has had no experience with fingerpaint. I am considering this his first true fingerpainting, since he was able to really get into it and get his sweet little hands messy!

He attacked the green fingerpaint just as I had hoped he would the time before! He intently scraped the paint with his fingernails and smeared it all over the paper and his high chair. I stripped him down to his diaper for this, so I was ready and excited for him to get as messy as his little heart desired.

I thought for sure he would eat as much of the paint as he could, but he didn't! Just a little taste here and there and a couple smears on his face. He was more so interested in figuring out how he was getting the color from one side of the paper to the other. It was so funny to watch him figure out the cause and effect of painting. He was so excited that he could move his fingers around on the paper and the color would move with them!

While he painted, I talked to him about the color green. I will be reinforcing this color concept with him for the next two weeks, as we continue with our crafts and activities. We will definitely be giving our green paint and ink pads some good use! Generally, whenever I hand him something, I find myself saying the name of the object and the color. Sometimes, I will also say the shape.

I used Scotch tape this time to attach the paper to his high chair and it worked so much better! It didn't rip the paper when I went to take it off and he wasn't able to rip it off of his high chair. After this activity, I realized that the high chair tray with the dividers that I had been having paint on actually comes off leaving a perfect flat surface for crafts. Obviously somebody didn't feed the instructions ... Oh well! We will definitely be using that part of the high chair from now on. 

I decided to add gold and green glitter to his painting. He watched me intently as I sprinkled some over his artwork. 

Kingston loved fingerpainting. I love process art. I could definitely tell that he enjoyed himself and got a lot out of exploring with paint! I plan on fingerpainting with him at least once a week! He also enjoyed clean up. A LOT. He laughed and laughed as I wiped him down with baby wipes. Between this project and his dinner (he tried butternut squash for the first time!), it was definitely a bath night!!