Slide Painting Activity

A few weeks ago I shared a Kids Window Art activity we did that involved the use of watered down tempera paint. I had some of that paint leftover and I am pretty frugal so I wanted to find another use for it. Since it was very runny, I thought it would be fun to pour and splatter it. I thought about doing this on an easel (which would yield similar results) but decided to use our slide to watch our paint drip. Slide painting is a great way for kids to explore the effect of gravity on paint. For more painting fun check out Painting with Golf Balls. We used two methods of slide painting, dripping and pouring, and we loved the results of both.

You will need:

• Slide or easel
• Easel paper
• Watered down tempera paint
• Paintbrushes
• Paint cups
• Tape
• Tarp or trash bag

I taped some easel paper from a roll to our slide to prepare for our activity. Don't worry about taping every spot. You will have paint get on the slide but it will wash off easily with a hose. I placed a trash bag on the bottom of the slide to catch any paint that might spill on the ground.

I explained how we would be dipping our brushes in the paint and letting it drip on the slide. This required the kids to get a good amount of paint on the brush. They were excited to see what would happen to the paint when they dripped it on the slide.

They noticed that when they didn't load up the brush with much paint, it would just splatter on the paper, but if the brush had lots of paint on it would cause drips that slowly made their way down the slide.

One of my twins had the idea of dripping paint from the ground to see if it would have the safe effect. It did.

A few times during the drip painting activity, the kids commented about how slowly the paint was moving. I suggested that we try pouring the paint directly from the cup to see if it moved any faster. My twins predicted that it would go faster while my youngest thought it would be the same.

The results were very different. The paint rushed down the slide when we poured it as opposed to the slow dripping.

It was fun to do this painting activity with different colors of paint as they looked really pretty when combined.

We used every last bit of paint.

Because of the way the paper was taped, all the paint colors seemed to flow in the same direction. The kids noticed that occurred even when they changed where they poured the paint from.

If you don't have a slide at home, this would be fun to do on an easel or even a piece of plywood covered with paper leaned against a fence. There are lots of ways you can explore drip painting and pour painting with kids and a fun one is this slide painting activity.

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