Finger Painting turned Monster Truck Race

Joel has been asking about what happens when two different colors are mixed. For example, "Mommy, what happens when yellow and blue mix?" The answer here is, of course, green.  After talking through this several times and covering all of the possibilities several times, one particular day while Kirstin was napping I thought it would be a good idea to allow him to explore some of this color mixing.  I'm all for making a mess for the sake of learning, but the timing has to be right (which is why it took a couple of days before we did the experiment).

Since I tend to save things that might work well for a project someday (much to the annoyance of my loving husband who would really prefer I throw it all away), I had a giant piece of paper that was packaging for something.  This giant piece of paper happened to have a shiny side, very much like the expensive finger paint paper, but this was free so much better! :-)

So I told Joel to come to the kitchen and roll up his pants legs and take off his shirt, at which point I had his attention because I'm normally telling him to put his shirt on! I laid the giant piece of paper on the floor.  I put squirts of finger paints into an old egg carton (another item of trash potential project material that I saved).  The egg carton worked really well to hold the perfect amount of finger paint and I could throw it away at the end to minimize clean up time (even though finger paints wash really easily!).

So after about 1 minute, Joel's excitement for painting was done.  However, I still had finger paints out that I wasn't going to throw away and this great giant piece of still mostly blank paper.  So, I had an idea....

I got a couple of Joel's hot wheels cars (with various sizes and textures of wheels) and began to drive them through the paint.  This is where Joel became engaged and excited about the painting again! :-)

I would paint sections of the paper and Joel would drive the cars through it.  He was so excited to be doing this.  It made really cool tracks all over the paper.

Joel said that he was having a monster truck race.  He even tore the paper a bit at one point when a car jumped through some paint.

The whole scene

The good news is that a baby wipe cleaned the finger paints that got on the bamboo floors and little boy very easily.  No damage done and we did color mixing via a monster truck race. :-)

Oh and this lovely giant piece of paper is now folded up in Joel's room because he also likes to save things.  However, I will likely be able to talk him into getting rid of it after a few weeks of it not being looked at again.  It's all about the process for me!