MAMA Children’s Activity Post: Bird House Painting!

My son loves playing in the garden. His favourite activities are watering the flowers, feeding the birds, finding insects and playing football! Therefore I wanted to try and make something together that we could use to decorate the garden and help attract more wildlife – so here’s how we created our bird house!

Equipment;

– Plastic activity mat or old towels.
– Old clothes or painting aprons.
– Wooden (untreated) bird house.
– Paint brushes.
– Acrylic paints.
– Water pot.
– Card.
– Wipes.

Step 1: Preparation.

As this was quite a contained activity I set up our painting area on the table. I put the bird house, paint brushes, paints and water pot on the activity mat and then we got into our painting clothes.

Step 2: Painting time!

The acrylic paints we had were in little tiny pots – they were actually left over from other activity sets from over the years so always good to keep the extras for future projects!

My son found it quite fun using the little pots as opposed to our normal large ones or paper plates. It was really good for his fine motor skills and he concentrated really hard!

To begin with I encouraged cleaning the brushes in between colours however, my son enjoyed mixing the paints and as he was doing this and layering the paints on it began to look like camouflage which I thought looked great. Also probably best a bird house isn’t too bright or it may scare the birds away!! So I guess for this activity the muddying of the colours was actually beneficial!

Whilst my son was great at covering most of the bird house I did help to do some of the edge bits to finish it off and make sure it was all covered.

Step 3: Experimentation time!

Once the bird house was complete I put out some card and my son then had fun using his hands and brushes to use up the rest of the paint. He also liked pouring some of the water from the pot onto this to make a nice messy, watery, sensory play to finish our MAMA afternoon!

Step 4: Tidy tidy tidy up!

I put the bird house to dry and brushes to soak. Then I mopped up the excess paint with wipes before dunking my son in the bath! I finished cleaning the rest of the brushes and wiping the mat once he was all in PJs.

Now you have a lovely bird house to decorate your garden with and hopefully attract some little birds! Hope you all have fun taking the art outdoors!

Don’t forget to share any of your creations we’d love to see them at http://www.megaawesomemessyart.com or Instagram, Facebook or Twitter!