My 5 year old has been learning about space this term and she’s fascinated so we’ve been watching loads of videos from the International Space Station on Youtube, building rockets and making papier mache planets, which is great, but when I have her little sister at home for home schooling as well, I sometimes need a space craft for preschoolers as well as the early years primary range, so we’ve been making these watercolour planets and sticking them in our black paper galaxies.
Watercolour planets are a really simple watercolour painting activity for kids, and they’re a great way for teaching children different watercolour techniques. They can experiment with different ways of mixing watercolours on paper, be it in dry, heavily pigmented lines which give the final planets a geode type look, or seeing how wetter paint mixes to create new colours and softer blends. With our watercolour planets, we experimented with tipping salt onto the wet paint to soak some of it up for a random, textured finish. We used sharpies to create our distant stars because my daughter is obsessed with them and was desperate to use the silver, but you could also use paint spatter acrylic which would look really cool and would introduce another technique.
When our watercolour planet paint experiments were dry, we just drew around them with circles and stuck the watercolour planets on black cardboard to create our galaxies, before sticking on a paper rocket ship that we drew after watching this really simple, easy rocket ship drawing tutorial from Mister Brush as part of one of my daughter’s school lessons.
Do you have a favourite space themed craft activity?
Tinkers and Twine 