Butterfly Printing
We have had an exciting few weeks watching our caterpillars life cycle and eagerly waiting for them to change into beautiful butterflies. This week I set up an activity for the children to explore symmetry while having some fun painting. If you have the chance to keep your own caterpillars this summer or your children have a fascination of butterflies give it a try.
What you will need:
Paint’s
Paint brushes
Paper
We started off the activity by looking at photo’s of butterflies in book and watching a video on You Tube explaining the life cycle of the caterpillar. By this point our pot was still filled with caterpillars which had grown quite large. We looked at the different colours of paint and discussed what colours we thought our butterflies would have.
We then used these ideas to paint our butterflies and create our own designs.
- We simply folded the paper in half and made our wings on one side.
- Once this was done we halved the paper again rubbing the paint in between the two layers.
- Open up the paper slowly to reveal your beautiful butterfly.
Make sure before you start that you have plenty of paper to hand, my children loved making them and continued to try out new ideas all afternoon.
We stopped to look at how the paint had spread and also copies exactly the same on the other side.
Early Years Development Matters:
Mathematics- •Notices simple shapes and patterns in pictures
Understanding the world- •Comments and asks questions about aspects of their familiar world such as the place where they live or the natural world. •Can talk about some of the things they have observed such as plants, animals, natural and found objects.
Expressive arts and design- •Explores colour and how colours can be changed.