Story Stretchers: April Showers

Oh my goodness! All this RAIN we're having!!!

All I have to say is we'd better have some AMAZING May flowers. :)

We read a couple new books on rain last week - both ideas I found in Will's Scholastic order form and then borrowed from the library:

Rain Drop Splash by Alvin Tresselt

And Thunder-Boomer! by Shutta Crum
Cute stories.

Then on Wednesday evening, when we returned from Sophie's well-check with the pediatrician, I set the kids up to create a "rainy day" picture while I got dinner ready. Good news: I am finally getting over my fear of paint! As evidenced by the fact that I'm letting them paint on my fridge... without smocks! :) I don't know why I used to be so uptight about paint. Children's paint is totally washable... and so much fun!

I taped two pieces of card stock on the fridge and watered down some blue and green paint in some old plastic bowls to make our rainy scenes. This idea came from another great blog I follow and also a preschool crafts website.

They each used a color for awhile and then switched. I just asked them to cover the whole page completely.

I love the color combination of the blue and the green together. It reminds of some of the illustrations in another book we read recently called Daisy and the Egg by Jane Simmons.

I told them as they covered the whole page, they'd see a surprise appear.

It's not as obvious as I would have liked, but if you look closely, you can see it. And the kids LOVED it!

I colored raindrops onto the cardstock using white crayon before they painted. They couldn't see it when they were getting started, but the paint resisted the crayon wax and the raindrops showed up as they were working. :)

This was a super easy and cute project that could entertain them while I made up their dinner plates.