Invitation to Create a Mess-Free Cling Wrap Painting – Day 8/31 Days of Invitation to Create Challenge

Day 8/31 days of #toddlerartinvitations

Invitation to create a mess-free cling wrap painting. Ok I have to confess, while this is done by my toddler, it was done when she was only 8mo. It was sooo hot in Perth today as well as the past few days. Our house traps heat and it really felt like I was stuck in an oven that I kinda just shut down physically and mentally 😩😣, so I thought I’d scroll through my old posts and do a throwback instead. While this activity was done by an infant, I’ve done this with my kinders in the past so it’s definitely a toddler activity too.

For the invitation, I simply squeezed dollops of paint onto a piece of paper, put cling wrap over it, stuck it down with sticky tape at the back and let her go at it. This was always how I did it with my kinders. I like using the cling wrap because of a different textured look on the end product as seen from the lines made. It’s actually even prettier when it dries and the cling wrap sticks to the paper.

This picture shows a portion of the end product that I used to make a Father’s Day present for the hubs last year.

Some of my kinders in the past have preferred to pull off the cling wrap when they were finished and I’ve included the equally beautiful end product of one of my kinder’s effort from 6 years ago!

A note of caution, while this technique is perfectly safe to use with toddlers & preschoolers, I probably won’t do it with babies again. When I did it with my 8mo, it didn’t work out the way I had in mind. I forgot that my baby was developmentally nowhere near my kinders. My kinders knew how to gently press down on the cling wrap to mix the colours so that the fragile cling wrap wouldn’t tear. My baby was full on scrunching up the paper and I was worried the cling wrap would tear, she would get paint on her hands and ingest some. A more baby-friendly option would be to slip the paper into a large durable ziplock bag instead before you offer it to a child.

So there you have it, a wonderfully sensory invitation to create/ colour exploration that can be modified to suit babies right up to preschoolers ✌🏼