Lemonade Slide Painting

If you are a regular reader of Twodaloo, you know how much I value process art as a language-building activity for young children (If not, you can read all about it in my post Building Language with Art). I wanted to do some open-ended art within our lemonade theme that would involve all the senses and get the twins outside and moving on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Wanna see what we did?

First, I decided to mix up some zingy “lemonade” paint. I grabbed a bottle of bright yellow tempera, squirted it into a plastic bowl, and then added a “magic” ingredient that made it foam up like crazy AND smell delicious (Curious? Click HERE to see what we added!). Then we shook in a healthy dose of translucent glitter to represent the “sugar” in the lemonade. And voila! Magic Lemonade Paint!

Remembering how much fun we had with our Coffee Can Ice Cream on a Slide, I wanted to find another way to use the slide for play. I’ve seen versions of slide painting all over Pinterest this summer, so I thought I’d give it a try with the twins. I covered our slide with white butcher paper, taped it down, and gave the twins two lemons (leftover from our Language and Lemonade activity) and the sparkly lemon paint. Oh, and I stripped them down to their diapers, because I just know better 😉 My little munchkins proceeded to dip the lemons in the paint and roll them gleefully down the slide, creating vibrant yellow stripes each time.

They LOVED it! And when the paper eventually started deteriorating, I covered their little art table with another sheet and let them go to town with their hands (and cars, and rocks and sticks, etc.)

And then for cleanup time, we went swimmin’…with lemons!

As for our slide-painted masterpiece, I let it dry in the sun and then cut a few triangles from it before discarding the rest (it was pretty mushy) and had the twins help me thread them onto a length of yellow yarn. It created a sunny bunting to decorate our family chalkboard which we use to help us talk about our day during dinner time.

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