Marble Painting

I have been wanting to do marble painting for a long time, but for some reason I have never gotten around to doing it with the children until last week.  I was inspired by the way Jean Van't Hul documented the project in her book, The Artful Parent, and wanted to have my 2 1/2-3 year olds give it a try.

What I liked about The Artful Parents project was the use of muffin tins to roll the marbles around in.  Brilliant!  Such an easy way to control the mess and I have these wonderful trays that kept the marbles contained, so we were golden and the children loved it. 

They first rolled the marbles around in the paint with a spoon.

Dropped them on their paper...

Then slowly moved the tray around and started the marble painting process.

It is a great hand-eye coordination project because they have to be sure not to move the tray too fast or the marbles would "jump" out of the tray.

I really like the way the paintings turned out.

I also had my 3 and 4 year olds make their own, and both age groups loved it.

Another aspect of this project that some of the children enjoyed was to just use their hands to paint with the marble, which created a nice scribbling technique with the paint.