Decorated Pots

We’re going to plant some sunflower seeds this week – and so I decided that these very special seeds should have a very special home. As J’s friend A was coming around we got out the paints, aprons and set up some craft to decorate some pots to house our sunflowers in.

What you need to make the Decorated Pot

Plastic plant pots
Paint (either acrylic or a 50:50 mix of ready mix paint and PVA glue)

How you make the Decorated Pot

We set J and A up at the table to decorate their pots as the paint wasn’t suitable for T (who still very much puts everything in her mouth) to be near. Each of them had a paint palette set up with the 3 primary colours and white as well as a selection of different brushes. – You will have noticed that we are using primary colours a lot in our craft station set ups as I’m trying to get J used to mixing colours and discovering on his own what happens when you mix the different colours together. Then we left them to it.

As I had mentioned we were going to plant sunflowers in the pots J decided to go for a yellow paint first of all as although he has never seen a sunflower when I mentioned the sun he told me “Sun is yellow”. True to form he decided to paint inside the pot as well – because we were using the paints in a 50:50 mix I wasn’t worried about this as the paint is no longer water soluble which if we had just used paint it would have leeched into the soil (it also wouldn’t have stuck to the pot).

Sometimes A or J asked for help to hold the paint pot up so that they could paint it the way that they wanted. It was really interesting to see how different children of the same age (A is 2 weeks younger than J) approach the same activity and also the different style in which they paint.

As the weather has been so nice outside this last week we put the pots outside to dry whilst J, A and T played in the garden. J’s pot in the title picture is the abstract picture whereas A’s is the pot decorated with spiders and figures.

Author

Cerys Parker

Cerys is a marine biologist, environmental educator, teacher, mum, and home educator from the UK. She loves getting creative, whether it is with simple and easy crafts and ideas, activities to make learning fun, or delicious recipes that you and your kids can cook together you'll find them all shared here on Rainy Day Mum.