Marble Painting with Children

I’ve written before about how much I value Sure Start Centres. Last week, the twins and I joined a friend and her daughter at our local one for a session we hadn’t been to before: Mucky Bears. The art activity for the week was marble painting.

I love how children learn through messy play. It helps them develop their creativity and imagination with a wide variety of objects, textures and materials. If I’m honest, I also love them doing the messiest of messy play somewhere other than our house.

Marble Painting

This particular week there was water play with various floats, coloured shaving foam piles to squidge hands into and make patterns with and a model farm complete with hay and construction toys. They played with it all. However, the thing that really captured them was the painting with marbles.

It was referred to as ‘marbling’. However, it wasn’t the marbling I’d done as a kid where you put inks onto water, which has washing up liquid in it, and then put a piece of paper on top to get a print. This was literally dunking and coating marbles in a choice of two paint colours, using a spoon to drop them into a tray lined with coloured sugar paper, and then rolling them around the tray. The girls did a picture each independently, a joint one where they took it in turns at doing a layer and a joint one where they both did everything at the same time. They were fascinated by how different each one looked. They were especially fascinated by how they got lots of different greens from just their blue and yellow paints.

A really simple, but great activity; and one that I actually will try at home.