Muddy Animal Painting

Yesterday we used these little Safari Ltd. animal pets in our “What Pet Should I Get?” activity, today we are using them in muddy painting process art! OK, I should clarify we aren’t actually using mud, we’re using brown paint, but my kids loved it none the less! We are big fans of muddy play in our house, but a severe California drought has left us with little more than dirt and dust. Today I let my boys get their pretend pets muddy and they had a blast leaving their little paw prints all over the paper!

Supplies

• Paper
• Brown paint
• Animal figurines (we used the pets toob)
• Small dish to contain the “mud”

Cannon jumped right into the messy fun! The cat, ferret, and bunny were all first to take a roll in the mud!

It wasn’t long before all the animals took a dive into the mud bath and left their little prints everywhere! And not just paw prints- the turtle was rolled on his shell, the bird had muddy tail feathers, and that poor white bunny was now spotted with brown mud 🙂 It’s a good thing we don’t have real pets! I think if we did then we would have to keep the brown paint away, however, it would be lovely to have a pet sometime down the line. I think we would first learn aboutsquirrel, dogs, cats, fish, or any other creature that can be petted. It would definitely be so interesting to know the distinct features each of these have and adopt one accordingly. I am not sure though which animal we would decide on, however, I’m pretty sure of the fact that whatever animal it is, it will be loved to the moon and back by all of us, we may even have one of those needle felted animals of their face on our mantlepiece I bet, but I think the kids will want to have a try at creating one first!

Painting with our animal figurines is a great process art activity because we weren’t trying to make anything in particular. The point of this activity was just to explore painting with something other than a brush (encouraging creativity and flexible thinking).

While I like to tie in most of our activities with a learning objective, this one was just fun process art! It was a nice sequel for our pet animal figurines as we had just finished reading What pet Should I Get? and used them in a guessing game! I love how much use we get out of our animal figurines!

If you’re looking to fit this activity into your preschool lesson plans, it would be a great for many themes depending on the animals you use: farm or barnyard animals theme, pets theme, etc. It would even make a great messy play date activity!

How would you incorporate muddy animal painting into your preschool lessons? I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments below!

This activity is part of a fantastic painting series held by Emma Owl called Paint-a-thon 101 Ways to Paint with Children! Head over there now to find more fun painting activities!