Kids outdoor activity: Painting with chalk

A quick and easy way to turn chalk into paint with your kids

On a hot summer day a while back Victoria had one of her friends over on a play-date.I thought it’s a nice opportunity to try out a new outdoor kids activity. We had done painting the walls before, but this time, I decided to make our own paint with the kids. And they loved it! We were all so much into the making paint thing, that I forgot to make pictures of it. Luckily I have some pictures of the result 🙂

A side note: This might seem complicated, but don’t worry, as a busy parent I go for the fast and easy option 🙂 I’m not going to explain some mind blowing way of making paint as I’m not into trying out difficult and time consuming stuff. What we did, took us virtually no time and it was super fun.

What you’ll need in order to make your own outdoor paint is:

• lots of colorful chalk
• something to crush the chalk (I used a mortar and pestle, but if you don’t have this, you can use a hammer and a plastic bag )
• water
• some painting brushes and small pots to store the liquid paint so the colors won’t mix

As a first, we crushed the chalk in the mortar until we got chalk powder. We kept the chalk powder in separate bowls, making sure that the colors wouldn’t mix. The kids were taking turns to do this and they REALLY loved crushing the chalk and sorting it by color.

We used the cups from Victoria’s tea sets for the chalk powder and when the chalk-crushing-fun was over, I added some water and used the brushes to mix it until I got a “paint looking” consistency.

And that was it! The kids could start their outdoor painting fun.

While Victoria and her fiend (5 and 6 years) first discussed and agreed to paint a fairy land with a huge rainbow, Lukas (3,5) did his own abstract art.

This kept the kids very focused for 30-40 min, and at the end we could admire the kids’ master pieces on the walls of our courtyard.

I hear you think “oh no, what a messy thing to have on your walls!” But the cleaning is also fairly easy to do. One option is to just wait for the rain to clean it all up for you, like we did last time with our chalk wall painting.

This time I decided to be more proactive about cleaning 🙂  I used a spray bottle filled with water and gave it to Lukas. I didn’t have to explain much and in no time he was spraying all over the walls with water, spraying the chalk paintings away. I helped him out to get to the places he wouldn’t reach and soon after my walls were clean again 🙂 This way is also more fun for the kids than the rain cleaning alternative!

This whole activity was lots of fun! From making to cleaning, it kept 3 kids busy for the whole afternoon.

Besides the fact that it supports the kid’s creativity, this outdoor kids activity is also a great discovery trip for the kids:

• experiment with mixing colors and testing what’s the result of mixing them
• test around until you get the right solid/liquid state of the chalk
• some kiddie basic physic 🙂 (if there is lots of water in the mix, the paint will be running down the wall giving a bit of rainy effect to the drawing)

I definitely recommend doing this at home. You might not be as comfortable as me to get your walls painted, but I’m sure the kids would have just as much fun doing this on the pavement or on an easel.

Let me know if your kids like doing these kind of things too. Or do you play in a different way with chalk?

Note: I found the toy cups as being very handy for this activity because with their handle they were very easy to hold by the kids.