Play to Learn and Live to Play: No Mess Finger Painting

I am always looking for good ideas for activities that don't need to be totally supervised. It's good to have a few up your sleeves for those times when laundry or dinner need to get done. I saw this one on my good friend Kristen's (who is also helping to co-admin my Facebook Page) Pinterest board. I love this idea and it will probably be used many times, or as long as my kids find it interesting anyway.

This is a NO MESS Finger painting activity! You don't have to worry about paint getting ANYWHERE. Which is awesome. I did two different versions of this with my kids today and both work great. It just depends on what kind of finished product you (or your child in my case) would like to have. Caitlyn, my oldest, preferred the first method because it gives you a piece of art you can keep. So here they are.

You will need:

A large clear food storage bag

Paint, any colors

A piece of blank paper

Tape

For the first version we did, we cut the piece of paper to fit inside of the plastic food storage bag. Then added a glob of pink paint in one corner and a glob of purple paint in the opposite corner, closed the bag up tight, and then taped the whole thing down to the table by the edges.

She went right for it, no instructions needed!

Because of the paper, once the paint got spread around pretty good, it became a little difficult to push with her fingers. So she took one of our thick paint brushes and started using the end of it to draw shapes in the paint. She asked me to do a couple of the hearts for her, so it became a joint effort :)

To get the artwork out of the bag without ruining the painting, I just opened the bag and cut down the edges. You can see that the plastic bag also has a "copy" of the artwork on it! We actually took this and taped it to the window!

She wanted to add some glitter to it. Lovely!

This is the second version we did.

Same materials, except this time we placed the paper underneath the plastic bag before taping it down. This can be left to play with for as long as you like or as long as it stays in good shape.