Explore the book Mix It Up hands on with your young child through this simple Q-Tip Painting activity that encourages fine motor development, listening skills, and color theory exploration.
Earlier this week we decided to try a new challenge for our family – make it to the library at least once a week. In the two years that we have lived in Sioux Falls, this is week was the very first time that we actually visited one of our libraries. And it was completely worth it. The kids had so much fun exploring the different activities in our local library had set up for them. As we left this week each child picked out a book. Roo’s book for the week was Mix It Up
Ya’ll we have loved this book and over the next week or so you will be seeing quite a few activities from us to go along with this book. So definitely head out to your library to grab it,
order it off of amazon
Mix It Up Kids Literature Activity: Q-Tip Painting
Items Needed:
- Mix It Up by Herve Tullet
- Washable Paints in Primary Colors
- Paper Plates
- Q-Tips
- Art Tray (we use the IKEA SMULA trays)
Mix It Up!IKEA SMULA Tray
Washable Tempera Paint
How to Play:
Before even breaking out the paints we read through the book a couple of times. This book on it’s own is so much fun. Kids are encouraged to smash, shake, rub, smear, and engage with every single page of this book. After we read it so many times that Mr. Roo had basically memorized it then we pulled out the paints.
Set up was simple – circles drawn on a paper plate to create the beginnings of the color wheel.
Then we opened the book, read it again, and this time followed along. Actually creating the colors was pure magic for Mr. Roo!
And listening to him shout out each color that he created was just plain adorable. We even played around with creating different shades and inventing our own names for them. It was such a blast.
Then we got to this page. And ya’ll this page was the favorite. We did this one over and over again. For this page we pulled out all sorts of different textures to paint with to see if the colors would smear together differently. If you need some ideas on different styles of brushes make sure to head over and check out our DIY Texture Paintbrushes 😉
So. Much. Fun.
We ended the activity just exploring our mixed up colors and making a bunch of dots.
This is definitely an activity we will be doing over and over again! If you do this activity with your kids we would love to see your photos! To share your photos with us simply use the hashtag #parentingchaos on Instagram!
