Hey ho! A lazy summer day.
Doing very little.
Hanging out. And painting a bit.
With feathers.
We have a tin in the kitchen.
Which all our feather finds go into.
From the woods and the park and the beach.
It's a bit of a motley collection.
Some of them are a bit straggly.
And we're not sure what half of them are.
But today we decided to paint with them.
Nothing fancy.
Just some flowers.
And some trees.
By loading the feathers with paint.
And sweeping across the paper.
And splodging a bit.
The most lovely way to idle away an afternoon.
And have a chat.
But also a wonderful way for young children to:
- Develop mark making skills
- Build fine motor & pencil grip flexibility
- And observe shapes and patterns in nature.
Fine Motor Flexibility
Feather painting is particularly wonderful for building fine motor and pencil grip flexibility as children have to hold the feather quite lightly to make their marks. This helps those children who have very good fine motor coordination but stab very heavy handedly writing with a pencil.
Natural Pattern Observation
Pattern observation is fundamental to children's cognitive development in language and maths and later in science. Really simple craft activities with natural materials like feathers provide children with a glorious rich opportunity to observe all sorts of patterns from stripes and waves to speckles. These observations can be prompted easily and naturally as part of the conversation with simple questions and statements such as:
- I'm going to use a stripey feather.
- Look my feather has waves in it.
- Which feather are you going to pick?
- Does your feather look like my feather?
- Can you find any feathers that match?
All very simple but we're sowing the seeds of a scientist as we sit in the sun whiling away the hours painting.
Do give it a go and for more lovely simple natural crafting activities that provide brilliant learning opportunities for pre-school, early years and older children try these:
- Writing on tree bark scrolls with feathers
- Making bird nest collages
- Printing with poppy heads
- Freestyle foot painting
- Dissecting daffodils
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