The bathtub is the best place in the house for a really messy painting session. The walls are tiled, the floor is a tub, and the whole lot rinses clean with the shower head when you are done. So when a child is itching to paint something big and bright, a dry bath and a tray of rainbow paint is hard to beat. We rolled and brushed stripes of color straight up the tiles, and clean-up was a thirty-second rinse. Ages 1.5 to 4.
Setting it up
Squeeze four colors of washable children’s paint into a paint roller tray, keeping them in separate stripes so they load onto the roller as a rainbow. Stir a little dish soap into each color. The paint is washable already, but the soap is cheap insurance that it lifts cleanly off the tiles afterward. Make sure the bath is dry, then run the roller through the paint until it picks up the whole rainbow at once.
Rolling the rainbow
The first stripe up the tiles is the moment that sells it, a clean band of rainbow appearing on the white wall. A full-sized roller can be heavy and hard for small hands to steer, so a helping hand on the first few passes is worth it, but the result is so striking that most children will push on regardless.
Brushes for finer control
Leave a few paintbrushes in the bath alongside the roller and the tray. The roller makes the big dramatic stripes, but a brush is far easier for a young child to manage on their own, and it opens the activity up to dabbing, swirling, and painting the curved sides of the tub as well as the walls.
There is a quiet bit of development folded into all this. Painting up a vertical wall works the shoulder and arm in a way that flat table painting does not, and it builds the kind of upper-body strength that later helps with sitting to a table and holding a pencil. It just happens to look like a child gleefully covering the bathroom in rainbows.
For another vertical mark-making activity that works the same big arm movements, our chalking the walls takes chalk to an outdoor brick wall or fence. And to carry the rainbow theme onto paper, our free unicorn coloring pages lean into the same love of bright color.