Packing Peanut Paintings

Sometimes painting on a flat piece of paper gets old.  Try this smart trick to give your kids a new sensory experience. Packing peanuts are good for so many crafts and people are so quick to throw them away! So save those peanuts!  One day your kids will get stir crazy and you will need a new project for them to pour themselves into.

Materials:

• Packing peanuts (hopefully left-overs from a package but if not you can buy them cheap.)
• Thick paper (I used dry-cleaner shirt boards.)
• Kid's glue
• Any size paintbrush
• Washable paint
• Sharpie

   Start by choosing the paper you are going to use.  We save the cardboard pieces the dry-cleaner uses when they wrap up your shirts, they are great for so many craft projects.  As a matter of fact, you should start a 'craft scrap' bin in your house somewhere.  We save all of our scraps and store them in a big basket that we call our 'supply box'. Eli loves sorting through it and it's fun to figure out what to make out of your 'left-overs'.
   Now grab your packing peanuts. Glue them to the board in any shape you want.  We did a snake and a rainbow. They were the first things that came to my mind, but you could do any animal outline or shape. This is a great holiday craft, too...snowmen for Christmas, shamrocks for St. Patrick's Day, flower's for Mother's Day, there are so many options!

   Let your packing peanuts dry for a few hours and come back to the project ready to paint.  Use any size paintbrush and let your kids paint the packing peanuts and the surrounding paper/board.  This is a cool new thing for them to paint and it will be exciting for them to experience a new technique. Explain to them the difference in texture, the sounds it makes when they paint over it, etc.  Texture is a difficult thing for kids to understand so this is a great opportunity for them to learn something new!
   Once the paint is dry, use your sharpie to label what they drew.  When you label it, spell it out-loud and your kids to spell it back to you.  Having the name of their drawing right next to it will be effective recognition and it will help them when they learn to read.
  Enjoy your kids and help expand their imagination! They are never to young to craft!