Salt Painted Eggs

I found this idea for salt painting on Irresitable Ideas for Play-based Learning ( http://www.playbasedlearning.com.au/2010/11/painting-in-salt/ ) and adapted it to give it an Easter twist.  I gave the children large egg shaped templates and showed them how they could use glue sticks to make patterns on the eggs.  Luckily the glue sticks were purple so they could easily their patterns.  Okay, there weren't many patterns, it was more a case of smearing the glue mainly round the centre of the egg, but that was fine.

Next we had to cover our patterns is salt.  This part of the activity proved particularly popular and we became so absorbed that we often forgot others were waiting to use the salt!

 We then used the pippettes to transfer paint onto the salted parts of the egg to highlight our 'patterns'. I found these on ebay, you can get cheaper plastic ones but I have found they don't always stand up well to inexperienced users. The paint also needed to be watered down, otherwise it tended to sit on the salt, rather than spreading through it.

Using the pippettes proved more trickier for some.  One little boy was convinced that he had to leave the pipette standing in the paint for a short period so that it could fill up.

We created some fantastic designs, mainly due to the fact we were more interested in randomly squirting the paint on the eggs, which led to the pipette painting activity the following day)

And we couldn't resist exploring the salt further afterwards.

Links to EYFS:

PSED: Behaviour and Self-control - (sharing of resources)

PSED: Sense of Community - (awareness of cultures and beliefs arising from discussions of Easter - older children)

CLL: Writing

CLL: Handwriting

KUW: Exploration and Investigation (awareness of patterns eg zig zags, colour patterns)

PD: Using Equipment and Materials