Guttering Painting

We are excited to be taking part in a PAINT-A-THON hosted by Emma Owl. 35 bloggers have teamed up to bring you 101+ painting ideas for kids. We are huge fans of process art so couldn’t wait to combine Adam’s love of guttering and paint.

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Regular readers will know that Adam loves to push items down a ramp – so much so that we have a piece of guttering permanently in our living room! We recently purchased two pieces of 2 meter white guttering for our Incy Wincy Spider activity and knew it would be perfect for some guttering painting!

We were at Nana’s house for the day with my niece and nephew and positioned the guttering against the trampoline and slide. We placed a shower curtain at the bottom of the guttering to save Nana’s grass. Finally Nana and I squirted ready mixed paint at various intervals down the guttering. The children were desperate to have a go!

At first we tried ball pool balls but they were too light and got stuck in the paint. We squirted a little water down the guttering to help the ball pool balls but it didn’t make a difference.

Next we tried airflow balls but these too got stuck. Finally we tried golf balls and these worked instantly. What is more they also pushed the airflow balls and ball pool balls down too.

The toddlers had a wonderful time collecting the balls, pushing them down the guttering, watching the balls slide through the paint and seeing how far the balls would roll onto the shower curtain. They were occupied for ages.

Picking up the paint covered balls did get messy so we changed Beth into her swimming costume. Adam, on the other hand, has an amazing ability to avoid all paint on his clothes. One advantage of him not liking messy play!

Our guttering painting was a great activity to reinforce colour recognition. If we had only used two colours at a time we could have demonstrated colour mixing. Unfortunately our paint just turned to a yucky brown.