Make a Beautiful Corn Painting

You can never have too much of your child’s art on display in you home. Especially this time of year, when family and friends gather for the holidays, it’s nice to be able to showcase your child’s work and add a little fresh color to the surroundings. This fun and easy activity will allow you to do just that, while providing your child with a sensory exercise that helps strengthen fine motor skills and shows what happens when you mix different paint colors.

Once again, we visited the Talented 2s in Ms. Mikayla’s class at Kiddie Academy of Abingdon, Maryland, where the young artists demonstrated how to use ears of corn to create beautiful paintings. Using orange and yellow paint to give their project an autumnal feel, they used the corn as paint rollers to make colorful textured pictures that would make any parent proud.

Ingredients

Here’s what you’ll need for the activity: child-safe paints, ears of corn, art paper, paper plates.

This activity rates a nine on the messiness scale, so do the project in a place where you won’t mind a few sloshes of paint that can be cleaned up when you’re done.

Step 1

Make sure your child understands not to eat the corn because he or she will need it to paint with.

Step 2

Give your child a paper plate, an ear of corn and a sheet of paper for painting. It’s a good idea to let your child practice rolling the corn before they begin to do it with paint. Think of it as a dry run.

Step 3

Put dollops of paint onto the paper plate. We recommend using two colors that will blend well like red and yellow. Have your child dip the corn into the paint, reminding them NOT to eat the corn.

Step 4

Have them move the ear of corn to their art paper and roll it to transfer the paint to the paper. Repeat the steps with different colors of paint and frequent reminders NOT TO EAT THE CORN.

Step 5

Put the art somewhere safe to dry and wash your hands! A change of clothing may be necessary, as well.

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