Our art this week was inspired by a question from Jo , who tweeted me asking for suggestions for acorn crafts for her Woodcraft Folk group. The idea of painting with them popped into my mind. We’ve tried this before with marbles - but why not give it an autumn spin and use conkers or acorns instead?
Jo tried this with her two- and three-year olds and they loved it - and so did we!
Autumn painting with conkers and acorns
You can do this two ways: by giving each child their own piece of paper to make their own individual masterpiece, or by using a huge piece of paper and having a group work together as a team project.
Either way, it’s a good idea to place your paper in something which has some edges to catch the conkers as they roll around – you could try a plate, baking tin, lid from a box, or even an old paddling pool. This bit isn’t essential and if your kids love getting messy they could sit around the paper and catch the conkers in their hands and roll them to each other. It depends how messy you want this to be!
Place blobs of paint around your paper – we used autumnal colours of red, orange, yellow and gold. Add the conkers and acorns and get rolling. As they’re not a perfect sphere the conkers won’t roll as smoothly as marbles but you can jiggle and shake to get them moving.
Once your conker paintings are dry you can transform them into another art project too.
- use them to decorate thanksgiving cards
- make them into number shapes and create an autumn number line
- cut out leaf shapes and make a autumn tree collage
 |
Love this Cathy! I have something similar to this planned to do with Henry!
Great minds think alike!
Great idea!
Love the colours!
Oooh what a very fun idea… so seasonal, especially when you pick those autumnal colours! Love it!
Thank you for joining in at Kids Get Crafty!
Maggy
What a great twist! That’s a great idea. Thank you for sharing!
Just yesterday I was thinking if we could do some painting with the chestnuts. These look lovely,well done!
[...] enjoying messy fun with roly poly autumn painting [...]
[...] Acorn 23. pipe cleaner 24. thumb 25. leaf 26. [...]
[...] your kids collect acorns? Mine love to squirrel them away. This is a great kids painting activity using acorns to make [...]
[...] Paint with acorns (NurtureStore) [...]
[...] ich weiter Blüten ausstanze, Papierringe klebe usw. Aber dieses Projekt war ein Hit! Ich hatte hier davon gelesen – allerdings haben wir kein Backblech genommen, sondern die Kastanien einfach in [...]
[...] 62. Set up a painting station 63. Decorate flower pots 64. Explore symmetry 65. Reverse print 66. Make a roly poly painting 67. Try contact paper art 68. Use oil pastels 69. Print with flowers 70. Go big! 71. Paint with [...]