Looking Closely Watercolour Paintings

This week we saw a lot of interest in painting with watercolours. After going on our weekly walk last Friday some of our kiddos wanted to paint the trees they saw. We revisited the the story Picture A Tree by Barbara Reid to look closely at trees during the different seasons.

We set up a painting table for the kiddos to experiment. First we set up some ground rules for this centre. If the kiddos wanted to create a beautiful watercolour they needed to produce a plan or draft version of what they were going to paint. They needed to make sure they had the details and colours they thought they might use.

Work in Progress completed over several days

For the following kiddos we added a new step to begin with completing the background for their picture. This is a great exercise in patience as they needed to wait for the background to dry prior to drawing with fine markers the picture they would end up painting. For some kiddos they wanted to see the snow sparkle so we found some sparkles and added it with a white glue water mixture to make their pictures shine.

Christmas Tree, Sun, Flower. Happy.

I made a snow tree. It makes me feel happy.

As final step we asked the kiddos what they had created and how it made them feel.