Painting Without Paint - Art and Science

When I told my Picassos that we were going to paint without paints I got two main responses... Some of them gave me the 😳 face "Well I guess today is the day.. . Miss has finally tipped over into crazy land" but some of my kiddos looked at me like 🤔 "ok I'm interested to see where you're going with this." I'd like to think that I can eventually convert all my kiddos into believers of my process lol... But we shall see 😆

Anyway, the children used chalk pastels to make a simple drawing of some colourful birds. (I brought lots of reference pics of finches, lorikeets, budgies and more.)

Then I showed them the magic trick! They mixed up some liquid starch and I had them guessing what applying this mixture over their pictures would do and we set it up like a little experiment!

They made a hypothesis or prediction of what would happen, they observed, tested and we drew our conclusion! Liquid starch lends chalk pastels some of it's viscosity! This means the chalk colours become easy to mix and blend just like paint and the results are nothing short of wondrous!