Animal Prints

Last weekend, Jonathan was set on being noisy- banging, yelling, crashing.  LOUD.  I'm all for letting little boys run and jump and yell and be noisy messy little guys.  The problem was that little sister and sick papa were asleep.  Solution?  Coral him in the kitchen with a really fun project.  This took about 10 minutes to set-up including the time I spent rooting around in our disaster of a craft cabinet looking for the washable paint.

I cut open and laid flat a bulk diaper box, poured a mixture of paint into a shallow pan to make our "mud", and then collected some animals and cars from our toy bins.

I showed Jonathan how to dip the animal feet into the mud and demonstrated how to walk them down the cardboard to make foot-prints once and then he was all in.

We had fun looking at the animal feet first, guessing what the foot-prints would look like.  I think making the prediction first helped Jonathan pay more attention to the tracks he was making as he played.  Our favorite was the stegasaurus because he made 4 clear footprints AND a tail print.

But they were all pretty fun.  The project served its function and kept him happily occupied for about 40 minutes!

The paint was almost entirely contained to the cardboard and when we were done I just dumped all of the animals into a sink of soapy water to soak until a more opportune time to wash them. (And by then most of the paint had already rinsed off).