Bubble Painting and Sandpaper Fish

We were planning to go and feed the ducks today, but the kids wanted to paint so I thought we'd try bubble painting! I mixed some tempera paint and dish soap and a little water and gave it a test, but the color was too heavy and stayed at the bottom of the bowl so we added food coloring. Didn't make dark bubbles, but you can tell they are bubbles so it was good for us. We went outside, put on Mommy's t-shirt and started to blow bubbles. We had a few (maybe more than a few) soap in the mouth incidences, but I was starting to think they were doing it on purpose so they could rinse their mouth out and spit in the grass! They didn't really care about putting the bubbles on the paper, they were having such a great time just making bubbles! Next time we'll just use soap and water. (easy cleanup!) They ended up with three prints each and were happy about it.

Next we colored sandpaper fish. I saw this on some preschool art website a while back but this was the first time we tried it. The kids colored a fish with crayons as hard as they could and we ironed it onto their bubble printed paper. Didn't turn out. I think we needed to use a finer grade sandpaper. We ended up with little dots of crayon on our paper. Good experience to color on a different texture, but the final outcome was a bummer. Oh well. Gregory had a great time rubbing the fish together making lots of racket!

They though they'd get bigger bubbles if they worked together!